Elliott Joseph

Editorial

2008-04-08T15:19:00.002Z

Readers will have noticed that transmissions have become infrequent of late. I regret that I will continue to be busy elsewhere for a little while, but fully intend to return to the fray when I have time - perhaps in a month or so.

I shall endeavour to drop in from time to time to publish comments. In the meantime, thank you for dropping by.

Bureaucratic Land Grab

2008-03-31T15:03:00.001Z

As reported by the Daily Mail today:

Unelected bureaucrats will be handed draconian new powers to hit people with fines of thousands of pounds without ever needing to find them guilty.

The paper isn't exaggerating.

According to the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill as it currently stands, a "fixed monetary penalty" may be imposed by a regulator

where the regulator is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the person has committed the relevant offence.

So unprecedented extra-legal powers are to be conferred onto - well, onto whom, exactly? The paper mentions 27 regulatory bodies, but according to Section 36 of the Bill, powers will be conferred on a list of 27 "designated regulators", plus any other body which

has an enforcement function in relation to an offence ... contained, immediately before the day on which this Act is passed, in an enactment specified in Schedule 6.

Schedule 6 lists 142 pieces of legislation going as far back as the 1930s, from the Accommodation Agencies Act of 1953 to the Zoo Licensing Act of 1981.

In other words, this is a bureaucratic land grab on a scale which the Mail's journalists have failed to comprehend: the wholesale empowerment of our state machinery to deprive us of our property without trial.

The only other mistake the paper makes is to assert that this further curtailment of our rights and protections is hidden away in "the small print". In fact, it is the vestiges of the government's promise to "lift the burden of red tape on business" which barely scrapes into the bill.

Subsection 1 of Section 70 (out of a total of 75) states that regulators must not

(a) impose burdens which are unnecessary, or (b) maintain burdens which have become unnecessary.

However, as Subsection 2 makes clear:

Subsection (1) does not require the removal of a burden which has become unnecessary where its removal would, having regard to all the circumstances, be impracticable or disproportionate.

So even this sad afterthought looks unlikely to lead to one single piece of red tape being undone.

To add insult to injury, the first part of the bill is concerned with establishing a new regulations quango called the "Local Better Regulation Office".

For the government to claim that this hideous law amounts to a lifting of red tape is typical of the contempt in which it holds the electorate.

Out Of His Depth

2008-03-19T17:01:00.002Z

Today saw a statement about national security given by a Mr Gordon Brown - our usually invisible Prime Minister - to the House of Commons.

It shows, beyond all doubt, that he has no real idea what is going on; no understanding of the threats facing the country; and no clue what to do about them.

Let's start at the top.

For most of the last half century the main threat was unmistakable: a Cold War adversary ... Now it comes from loosely affiliated global networks that threaten us and other nations across continents.

A half truth at best. As the leader of our country should be aware, the primary terrorist threat to it is measurably home-grown.

Mr Speaker, the foundation of our approach is to maintain strong, balanced, flexible and deployable armed forces.

Not really. The foundation of our defences against a largely domestic terrorist threat is vigilance and good policing. I agree that a strong military capability is a necessary asset in a forever unpredictable world, but if you believed that too, Prime Minister, you wouldn't have cut the defence budget. Again.

To harness a much wider range of expertise and experience from outside government and help us plan for the future we are inviting business, academics, community organisations and military and security experts from outside government to join a new National Security Forum that will advise the recently constituted National Security Committee.

Bigger talking shops; more jobs for the boys. Prime Minister, the failure of any terrorist to cause harm since July 2005 suggests that the domestic security framework isn't broken. Don't try to fix it.

I can tell the House that Britain will be at the forefront of diplomatic action on nuclear weapons control and reduction, offering a new bargain to non-nuclear powers.

Diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran getting the bomb began over a year ago and, in the absence of any willingness to use force, were doomed from the start. I don't know if you've ever listened to the speeches of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Prime Minister, but your brand of craven multilateralism just isn't going to cut it with people like him.

So in the same way that we have military forces ready to respond to conflict, we must have civilian experts and professionals ready to deploy quickly to assist failing states and to help rebuild countries emerging from conflict, putting them on the road to economic and political recovery.

I can tell the House that Britain will start by making available a 1000-strong UK civilian standby capacity - that will include police, emergency service professionals, judges and trainers - for this work.

And I am calling on EU and NATO partners to set high and ambitious targets for their own contributions.

More jobs for the boys, in what amounts to your only original contribution to foreign policy - and even that was announced two months ago. The EU and NATO won't be joining you in your mission, Prime Minister, because in the absence of a colonial administrative framework it's a patronising, unworkable - indeed, downright stupid idea.

We need to be able to tackle the underlying drivers of conflict and instability ---- in particular: Poverty, inequality and poor governance...

Insofar as it isn't meaningless, Prime Minister, that is ignorant, arrogant dogma.

But then, we shouldn't be surprised. Since his first speech on the subject as Prime Minister, Brown has revealed himself to be a foreign policy illiterate.

As with many other areas of public policy, when it comes to foreign affairs our disaster-prone son-of-a-manse is woefully out of his depth. Let us hope he is swept out of power before he manages to do any more real damage.

President Blair?

2008-03-18T13:46:00.001Z

I've just seen the reported results of a European poll from yesterday's FT, and the paper seems to be suggesting that they favour Mr Blair's chances of being the first President of Europe - at least when compared to Jean-Claude Juncker (who?), prime minister of Luxembourg (where?)

In an article penned by the splendidly-named James Blitz, Britain's pre-eminent eurofanatical paper made the following observations:

A clear majority of citizens in nearly all the large European Union states believe the EU must choose a high-profile figure as its first president ... a Harris poll for the FT shows that more than three-quarters of people surveyed in France, Italy and Spain believe the job must go to a high-profile figure who can represent the Union effectively - a view which was also supported by 50 per cent of Britons ...

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Tony Blair, the former British premier, are the only two politicians who get a clear level of support in countries that are not their own.

Merkel, of course, isn't available - she's got a proper job. Which at this stage makes Mr Blair the people's choice.

The polling on potential candidates deals another blow to Mr Juncker. Although 7 per cent of Germans want him to be EU president, he fails to receive the backing of more than 1 per cent of people in any other state.

Unfortunately for Tony Blair, however, the EU is known for its tyranny and corruption rather than any democratic tendencies.

On that basis, this poll means I'm putting my money on the undistinguished nonentity from the obscure tax haven ...

End Of The Road

2008-03-17T17:03:00.000Z

The Sunday papers would have made depressing reading for occupants of the government benches. Both the News Of The World and the Sunday Times carried polls under headlines which speak for themselves: "Tories 15 Year High" and "Support For Labour Hits 25-Year Low" respectively.

The detailed responses to ICM's poll for the NOTW are not yet available, but those given to YouGov, which ran the poll for the Times, make for fascinating reading.

The voting intentions themselves are a stark indication of weariness after nearly eleven years under the Labour yoke, with an appalling nadir of 27% for the government as against 43% for the Conservatives and a deservedly limp 16% for the Liberal Democrats.

Delve into the detail, however, and you find not only frustration with a tired-looking incumbent party, but a clear feeling that tax and spend politics has now been comprehensively tried, and has dismally failed:

60% agreed that "taxes can be cut without public services suffering because it is perfectly possible to run our public services more efficiently", twice those who thought that "In practice tax cuts that lead to less money being spent on the public services would mean that our public services suffer".
67% of respondents said that taxes in Britain are "Too high; the Government should tax less and spend less".
77% said they supported "Requiring everyone claiming incapacity benefit to attend a "work-focussed [sic] interview" to check whether they should continue to receive the benefit".

These large majorities in favour of smaller and smarter government cut across all ages, all social backgrounds and all areas of the country to a greater or lesser extent. (The only notable group taking a different view was that 27% of hard core Labour voters, who were split down the middle on the tax questions, though even they supported testing for incapacity benefit, presumably through a slavish adherence to party policy.)

In the 1990s, Tony Blair and others talked a lot about a "new kind of politics" which they called the "Third Way". This was supposed to mean striking a balance between supporting free enterprise and working to ensure social justice.

In practice, of course, what it meant was Labour Lite: not delivering a knockout blow to the productive, private sector of the economy as in previous socialist episodes, but rather strangling it slowly with the dead hand of the state.

Being more subtle than the smash-and-grab of earlier Labour eras, it took people longer to see the problem, but now that it has been recognised Labour Lite, like its more rugged predecessors, is dead.

Britain has at last realised that the Third Way - insofar as it ever really existed - was a cul-de-sac.

Hooligans Attack 57-Year-Old Vicar

2008-03-16T15:10:00.000Z

I first came across this story at A Tangled Web, which had picked up the BBC's cursory report of the incident:

A priest has been attacked in the grounds of his church, in what police described as a "faith-hate" crime.

Canon Michael Ainsworth, 57, was injured by two Asian youths at the church, in Tower Hamlets, east London.

ATW was irritated by the designation of the criminals as "Asian", and understandably so. As the fuller reports out on the cowardly attack today confirm, it was the faith, not the ethnicity, of Canon Ainsworth's assailants which was the salient thing about them:

The church had previously been targeted when a brick smashed a window during a service. Allan Ramanoop, a member of the parochial church council, said: “On one occasion, youths shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque, you should not be here’. (Telegraph)

Parts of east London have of course been solidly Asian / Muslim for many years. It is to be profoundly hoped that these anti-Christian attacks represent a temporary aberration on the part of a stupid minority of young men. After all, as I have noted before, Britain has an enviable record of integrating young Asians of all faiths, and most of us rub along just fine.

A local newspaper noted this in its level-headed coverage of the incident:

Canon Ainsworth wanted to emphasise the positive relationship he has with the large Asian presence in his parish and to play down the behaviour of disaffected youths.

He is also a governor of St Paul's School in Whitechapel, where 70 per cent of the pupils are Asian ...

So what should be done?

The Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, Bishop of Hulme, who used to work with Mr Ainsworth, said: "I would want to see a condemnation of this cowardly behaviour by senior Muslims in the community ...

Indeed. And alongside the imams, the teachers, friends and relatives of those responsible for these outrageous acts of religious violence should make it clear to them that they live in a society where such things are not to be tolerated.

The rest of us - and the media in particular - can help them in this task by facing, and stating, the facts: young Muslims have been vandalising a London church and have now assaulted an Anglican clergyman.

The majority of sensible, law-abiding British Muslims will quite rightly be shamed by the regrettable association of their religious identity with such despicable acts and prevail upon young Muslim hooligans to behave themselves.

They will thereby have forestalled any risk that other, perhaps equally noxious elements in our society will not echo the hooligans' call: "this should not be a Muslim country, this should be a Christian country, you should not be here".

Man-Made Climate Change Is Bunk

2008-03-14T17:13:00.002Z

Some of the government's tax raising agenda in this week's budget has been justified on the grounds that it is "good for the environment" as it will help prevent "anthropogenic climate change". For this reason I thought it timely to remind ourselves why the idea that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last few years has led to an increase in global temperatures is poppycock.

1) The ice core record clearly demonstrates that increases in global temperatures precede increases in atmospheric CO₂ by periods of several hundred years.

Take the word of Prof. John Mitchell OBE FRS, Chief Scientist at the UK Met Office (a major beneficiary and champion of the global warming agenda):

Over the several hundred thousand years covered by the ice core record ... changes in temperature did drive changes in carbon dioxide.

2) Palaeoclimatological evidence, which is grounded in the geological study of very long periods of time, shows that over multi-hundred-million year periods there has been no connection between temperatures on Earth and atmospheric CO₂ levels.

An article called "Climate And The Carboniferous Period" uses data from Yale geologist R A Berner and University of Texas geologist C Scotese to demonstrate this:

The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today -- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today.

3) Climate models based on anthropogenic warming have been proved wrong.

All major computer climate models have predicted a constant, steady increase in temperature from the end of the 20th century based on continuing increases in atmospheric CO₂.

The actual data from major scientific institutions for the 21st century (so far!) - as presented by professional meteorologist Anthony Watts - show quite clearly that the Earth's temperature has in fact remained constant.

In other words, as those of us languishing through the coldest winter for many years could attest (e.g., e.g., e.g.) the climate models based on all that bad science are straightforward, if expensive, junk.

So why are we all being forced into costly and inconvenient changes in lifestyle?

As Canadian journalist Peter Foster put it recently in his article "The New Road To Serfdom":

It was a combination of the success of the environmental Left -- in particular activist non-governmental organizations -- in stoking the concerns of the electorate, and of the desire of bureaucrats and policy-makers to stay relevant, busy and in power ...

The environmental movement has also been astonishingly successful in co-opting education systems, and highly skillful at exploiting universal psychological tendencies to social conformity and deference to "authority" ...

The new Left ... has thus co-opted a huge coalition of self-interested or naive supporters, who are attracted by the prospect of preening as saviours of the planet. Together they are threatening to carry the globe down a new road to serfdom.

Don't fall for it. Be sceptical; be informed; challenge the unholy alliance of leftists, environmentalists and control freaks behind the global warming scare with the facts.

I hope this post will help you to do so.

Darling Deceives As Defence Spending Slashed Again

2008-03-12T14:16:00.002Z

New chancellor, same old smoke and mirrors.

The media has spotted that Alistair Darling has pushed up sin taxes and cut his growth forecast.

What they haven't noticed - because he somehow failed to mention it in his speech - is that the loss in revenue from lower growth is to be made up largely by swingeing cuts in the defence budget.

Buried in the text of the Financial Statement and Budget Report - as usual - is an estimated £5.8bn shortfall in government revenues relative to last autumn's Pre-Budget Report (p. 187), which will largely be made up by a £3.3bn cut in defence spending this year (p. 197).

That's a cut of over 7% from 2007-08.

This is what Darling actually said about defence:

The Defence Budget has seen the longest period of increased spending in a generation.

This year we again expect to spend over £2 billion more supporting our troops on the front line. Including around £900 million on military equipment.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to our service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families.

We are deeply proud of the bravery, professionalism, and courage they display in serving our country.

And that's it. While the numbers might very well be technically correct, to suggest that you're increasing spending while hiding the fact that you're actually putting through a massive cut amounts to deception.

Gordon Brown, of course, pulled exactly the same stunt last year - though admittedly on a less breathtaking scale.

Mr Darling: you have misled the House, deceived the country and betrayed our fighting men and women abroad.

Your master must be proud.

Invisible Man

2008-03-10T17:10:00.000Z

Gordon Brown's penchant for disappearing from view during times of crisis has become proverbial. Of late it has entailed his near-total invisibility (save for his weekly outings at Prime Minister's Questions, which he not surprisingly detests).

So how delightfully apposite to read in the Telegraph that Madame Tussauds has decided not to commission a waxwork of the reclusive son-of-a-manse since "he has not made a sufficient impact on the public":

Ben Lovett, a spokesman for the tourist attraction, said: "We have decided not to create a wax figure of Gordon Brown at this interim stage ... we will not make a Prime Minister until after the General Election as this is the best possible indicator of public opinion and popularity."

And to rub salt into the wound, the report ends by noting:

Still one of the most popular attractions at Tussauds, Mr Blair remains labelled as "Prime Minister of Great Britain" and stands next to President George W Bush of America and the other world leaders.

Even if Madame Tussauds were to commission a waxwork of our rather wooden PM, however, I doubt whether it would ever actually be made.

He would be too busy hiding under the table to sit for it.

Revolting Students

2008-03-07T16:59:00.000Z

The students of University College London have passed a nasty little motion against allowing the armed forces to recruit from among their number:

The UCL motion, proposed by Sham Rajyaguru, stated: "This Union believes that because the British military under the Labour Government is currently engaged in an aggressive war overseas, for the Union to use its resources to encourage students to join the military or participate in military recruitment activities at this time would give political and material support to the war."

Well - to be fair - a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of the 27,000 strong university has passed a motion:

The resolution was passed by around 80 to 50 votes.

A spokesman for UCL Union accused a group of "hard core", Left-wing students of orchestrating the vote. "It's quite a silly thing," he admitted.

Lest we think this spokesman a hyperbolic Bushitler stooge, a quick trawl of the miracle that is the Google cache yields the following admonitory vignette on ringleader Sham Rajyaguru:

I'm Sham, 16, Socialist git. I hate everything especally [sic] YOU.

Politically active students, of course, ordinarily are "quite silly". Some of those who once fell into that mephitic category are now running the country - into the ground.

Not that I have anything against UCL. (Some of my less academic school friends were constrained to study there.) But as this news demonstrates, students can be a noisome and unworthy bunch.

The time has come to amend the 1969 Representation of the People Act, which that old crook Harold Wilson erroneously believed would swing him the 1970 election. 18 to 20-year-olds should still have the vote - so long as they're not in full time education ...

Time For Some Facts

2008-03-05T17:26:00.000Z

The Telegraph reported today that Gordon Brown has announced a review of the Barnett formula on Scottish public spending, which it claimed means that an annual £1,500 more per head is now spent north of the border.

The vitriolic and ill-informed row which this provoked between English and Scottish readers in the comments indicated that the time had come to have a look at the facts. Do the Scots get more public money? Are they subsidised by England? And what about North Sea oil?

The first question is easily answered by a Treasury document called "Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA)". Latest figures - those for 2005-6 - show that the answer is "yes".

On the basis of the 87% of government spending which it is possible to account for by region, the Scots received £8,179 that year as against £6,835 for us Sassenachs (actually a difference of £1,344).

The second question is harder to answer. Identifying Scottish revenue is tricky. A report from the Scottish Executive, however, gives an informed estimate of £36.4bn for 2004-5 (excluding oil revenues).

Including £5.2bn of North Sea oil revenues would have given a Scottish government total income of £41.6bn.

The other side of the equation is simpler. The Treasury gives UK total managed expenditure of £491bn for that year. Multiplying this by the Scottish share of identifiable spending by region - 9.6% - gives total Scottish expenditure of £47.1bn.

Add in 9.6% of the UK's annual £31bn of debt interest and this gives an approximate Scottish budget of £50.1bn.

So even including all North Sea oil revenues, an independent Scotland would have had a budget deficit of £8.5bn a couple of years ago. At about 10% of Scottish GDP that is much higher than the UK's 3% (and completely unsustainable).

We could say, then, that England "subsidises" Scotland to the tune of 7% of Scottish GDP, or about £6bn per year.

On the North Sea oil question specifically, revenues were given as £9bn for 2006-07 in last year's Pre-Budget Report. They may well be even higher this year, but peaked over twenty years ago and fell as low as £1bn in 1991-2. So reliance on this source of revenue is a double-edged sword (and even the record oil prices seen recently would not have bailed Scotland out of its fiscal black hole).

For the modern British economy as a whole - contrary to what some seem to believe - oil revenue is irrelevant.

Finally, some Scots wondered why Westminster seems so keen to preserve the Union.

The answer is simple: Labour needs its Scottish seats.

That's the real benefit of breaking up the Union for England. £6bn is a rounding error for our public finances, but a fatally wounded Labour party - now that's worth having.

Ministry Of Unculture

2008-03-04T16:42:00.000Z

Margaret Hodge - who in one of those satisfactory accidents is MP for Barking - has come under deserved fire for bashing the Proms:

The audiences for some of many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking particularly of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of [Britain's cultural identity].

This is nonsense, of course. The Proms represent one of the largest celebrations of classical music in the world, attracting talent from all parts of the globe.

If Hodge thinks the audiences are all white middle class fogies of a certain age, she can't have been to many. Not that an opportunity to bash the middle class should be passed up of course, if you're a politician of a certain stripe.

Yet according to the Guardian's obligatory pre-leak of her ill-informed blithering, her attack extended much further than the Proms series:

She will also propose that a commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the accession of Henry VIII to the throne next year could be an opportunity to explore the strengths and weaknesses of British history...

What?! Our history is a fact. Studying it should illumine our own time and educate us about the origins of the society we live in. It is not - not! - an opportunity to apply cheap value judgements to past events based on modern pieties which may themselves prove all too transient.

Someone who speaks of the "strengths and weaknesses" of history, rather than the similarities and differences between historical attitudes and our own, is talking a language they do not understand.

She also said of Henry VIII that

a deeper understanding of his reign may help the important debate on England starting to emerge.

Again: what?! England is a country - and a rather fine old one at that - not a debating point. A deeper understanding of its history would indeed benefit those trying to run it - starting with Margaret Hodge herself, perhaps.

Apparently this woman is our Minister of Culture. Clearly one of those departments which, in the manner anticipated by Orwell - that's George Orwell, an old writer, Mrs Hodge - stand for the opposite of what their title suggests.

Proof Of Tyranny

2008-03-03T16:42:00.000Z

Yesterday, polling data from ten constituencies showed that a whopping 89% of British voters are against the Lisbon treaty. (The news was accompanied by one of those colourful protests in which people climb to the top of something.)

Yet the parliamentary arithmetic makes it almost certain, through the likelihood of Liberal Democrat eurofanatics outnumbering Labour rebels, that the treaty will become law.

This is what European politicians have come to call the "democratic deficit". An older word for it is "tyranny".

In the 2006-2007 parliamentary session, over 80% of laws passed over Britain originated abroad (36 bills received royal assent as against 159 pieces of EU legislation which were introduced by statutory instrument).

These laws are promulgated by an unelected bureaucracy on which the only democratic check is the largely toothless scrutiny of a travelling circus of embezzlers for whom barely 45% of the electorate see any point in voting.

The tyranny of King Charles I was obvious in that it involved the suspension of parliament for eleven years. The tyranny of the EU, operating through parliament, is more subtle - though as the passing of Lisbon in the teeth of massive popular opposition will demonstrate, no less absolute.

How dare our elected representatives elect not to represent us in this way! No wonder more and more of us aren't bothering to vote for them anymore either.

It's enough to make you join the record numbers of people leaving the country every year.

Claiming The Moral High Ground

2008-03-03T14:27:00.000Z

Oh dear, oh dear. What a storm of outrage there has been over the Russian elections!

Nobody is suggesting that a completely free and fair election would have yielded a different result. Nonetheless, "restrictions on opposition candidates and bias in the state media made the contest unequal" (Telegraph); "the poll was marred by violations" (BBC); "regional and local officials had compelled many public sector workers to vote for Medvedev" (Guardian).

The body all these outlets have been quoting - the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe - had the following to say on the subject of electoral fraud in the United Kingdom:

It is clear that the electoral system in Great Britain is open to electoral fraud. This vulnerability is mainly the result of the, rather arcane, system of voter registration without personal identifiers. It was exacerbated by the introduction of postal voting on demand [in 2001] ...

That was in January, and you can find it at the House of Commons library here - tacked on to a depressing litany of episodes of vote-rigging and electoral fraud covering most of this country over the last few years.

So our own polls have been "marred by violations" for ages. Not to mention the often absurd and well-documented liberal bias in our own "state media".

Oh, and let's not forget the 100,000 Scottish voters who were summarily disfranchised during last May's elections to their mini-parliament through failures in the (untried) electronic voting system.

Before getting too carried away about Russia's electoral shortcomings, therefore, it would well behove Britain's press pack to pay heed to our own recent history of electoral criminality, media bias and administrative incompetence.

Once, we in Britain could look with disdain at unsavoury electoral goings-on abroad. That time, sadly, is long past.

Rationed At The Point Of Delivery

2008-02-28T16:35:00.000Z

How long will it take for people to realise that British health care is rationed, not free, at the point of delivery? That our health "system" prioritises political imperatives over the objective of healing the sick?

More grim proof of these truths came with news today that Dorothy Simpson, a 61-year-old grandmother from Yorkshire, is to be denied a £5,000 operation to cure her potentially debilitating heart condition because a hospital guideline deems she is too old.

Perhaps the NHS might consider funding her treatment out of cost savings achievable by abandoning its propaganda activities: the notorious anti-smoking campaigns, the ongoing campaign against the overweight and the incipient campaign to outlaw drinking?

Perish the thought! British people are stupid and unworthy, and we must be hectored and coerced into living in the manner prescribed by the apparatus of the state. In fact, as the then health secretary declared a year ago, treatment should be denied to those very groups to support them in their decision to mend their ways.

The motto of British medicine seems fast to be becoming, "denying treatment to those who need it most".

Or what about the brainwave of some cancer specialists last year - that patients who can afford it should be allowed to pay for treatments which government rationing meant they couldn't get for free? Wouldn't this free up more tax money for deserving cases like Dorothy Simpson?

Again, perish the thought! British health care is to be resourced through an unwieldy, inefficient and inhumane centralised structure, or not at all.

The NHS will not be fixed until there is widespread recognition that it is, in some ways, broken. I wonder: what are the chances of that happening during Dorothy Simpson's lifetime - however long the bureaucrats decide that ought to be?

Hope - Yes, Hope - In Afghanistan

2008-02-23T16:33:00.001Z

In a story which has gone entirely ignored, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, commander of British forces in Helmand province in Afghanistan, has gone on the record to say that the Taliban are "worn down" - that after months of gruelling conflict our enemies are at last feeling the pinch. As the Times reports:

British troops in southern Afghanistan have “worn down” the Taleban and forced them to abandon many of their key strongholds in Helmand province, a senior commander said yesterday.

Brigadier Andrew Mackay, commander of 52 Brigade, said: “The Taleban are now suffering from a lack of manpower and that is why they are having to rely on foreign fighters."

Foreign fighters, such as those feculent traitors from the UK who were heard by the RAF among the Helmand Taliban earlier this month "speaking in clear Bradford and West Bromwich accents".

"They are also now operating outside their normal areas because they lack support from the local populations.”

In other words, they are losing.

So there is, at last, a sign of hope in Afghanistan. With persistence, there will be cause for celebration.

Why has this story not received more attention? What does the media establishment have to say about the conflict?

Sadly, it has become the pattern of modern journalism that coverage of good news from the front line barely makes it into print, whereas ill-informed speculation by people who seem determined that their side should lose is allowed to dominate the comment pages.

To give one example, the Times itself published a preposterous piece by tired by-the-numbers hack Sir Simon Jenkins three weeks ago. Under the inspiring title, "Fall back, men, Afghanistan is a nasty war we can never win", the dotty knight had the following drivel to spew:

The American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, flies to Britain this week to meet a crisis entirely of London and Washington’s creation. They have no strategy for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan. They are hanging on for dear life and praying for something to turn up ...

Every independent report on the Nato-led operation in Afghanistan cries the same message: watch out, disaster beckons ...

More soldiers will simply evince more insurgency ...

There is no sensible alternative to ending military operations ...

Of course, Sir Simon's ramblings were probably echoed all over the British media - his was merely the particular piece of poppycock I happened to catch at the time.

While hope for a victorious outcome in Afghanistan builds with every hard-fought battle won by Britain and America's exceptional armed forces, critics like Jenkins can only harp and cavil.

They would be better advised to keep up with the facts, listen to men like Mackay and support the valiant efforts of the civilised west to thwart the evil of backward Islamic theocracy in south Asia as elsewhere.

Perhaps the day may come when war reports are given the higher profile and blustery opinion takes a back seat. But that, alas, would seem to be a hope too far.

Stick To The Scumbags

2008-02-22T16:53:00.000Z

The murder of Sally Anne Bowman in 2005 was a terrible crime and it is to be hoped that Mark Dixie, her killer, remains incarcerated for the rest of his life.

Unfortunately, the case has renewed calls for the rest of us to suffer as well:

Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy, who led the Bowman investigation, said having the DNA of everyone in Britain on file would speed up arrests and cut down on further offending.

The cost and imposition of such an authoritarian measure should be enough to render it unconscionable, but there is another reason. It wasn't the DNA evidence alone which would have tended to incriminate Dixie:

Dixie, who was sentenced this afternoon and told that he would have to serve at least 34 years in prison, had a string of previous convictions for sex offences. Detectives believe he may even have killed while living in Australia in the 1990s.

And again:

His fantasising about the sex killing on an earlier occasion, when he performed a sex act over newspaper pictures of blonde Sally Anne, helped convict him.

Dixie filmed the act and the recording was discovered among his belongings in the barn of the Horley pub [where he was arrested for another offence in 2006].

As well as Sally Anne's murderer, then, Mark Dixie is also a convicted sex offender and pervert who might well have killed before.

There can be no objection to keeping the details of such filthy vermin on file. Those in the British justice system who would want to catalogue the whole country, however, would be well advised to stick to persecuting the scumbags, which is what we pay them for.

As I have written before, it is laudable that parliament has resisted calls for a universal rollout of the DNA database in the past.

It should continue to do so.

What The EU Does Best

2008-02-21T15:07:00.000Z

The EU may not have anything to teach the UK about constitutional affairs but it could give us a masterclass in corruption.

We Brits made the most awful fuss over the venal Derek Conway, who was at least relatively modest in his fraudulent squandering of taxpayer thousands (as opposed to the government at large which hoses away billions every week).

But he has nothing on his equivalents in that pointless travelling circus which calls itself the "European Parliament". As the Telegraph reports:

A secret European Parliament report has uncovered "extensive, widespread and criminal abuse" by Euro-MPs of staff allowances worth almost £100 million a year.

That figure is arrived at by multiplying £125,000+ a year in staff subsidies by the 785 members of the circus. (You will recall that Mr Conway embezzled less than half that amount over a period of a few years.)

It's not only the scale of euro-fraud which puts our own MPs' efforts to shame, it's the magisterial way in which the Europeans cover everything up. Whereas the Conway affair was fought out openly under the glaring scrutiny of the entire British media:

Only Euro-MPs on the parliament's budget control committee are allowed to see the report.

To do so, they must apply to enter a "secret room", protected by biometric locks and security guards. They may not take notes and must sign a confidentiality agreement.

Blimey. So do we need to send in Daniel Craig?

Au contraire, according to one EU spokesman. That would be overreacting.

"The document is not secret. It is confidential," he said. "It can be read by Euro-MPs on the budget control committee, in the secret room but not generally. That is not the same as a secret document nobody can read."

Quite. Not secret, just ... Discreet.

So we should be grateful for the indiscretion of Chris Davies, a Liberal Democrat MEP and one of the select few to be allowed access to the non-secret report in the secret reading room. As he told the BBC:

When I looked at this report my first reaction was to laugh at the outrageous extent of the abuses. [Strange sense of humour, these Lib Dems.]

Then that feeling turned to anger ... I think the allegations within this report from our own auditors should lead to the imprisonment of a number of MEPs. I think it's embezzlement and fraud on a massive, massive scale.

Indeed it is. Bigger than the Conway scandal, and better handled by the Continent's equivalent of Sir Humphrey.

What an education for the British people to see the Eurocracy doing what it does best!

Mistaken Identity

2008-02-14T17:07:00.000Z

What hollow laughter the following story provoked:

Bungling Whitehall officials got their Newcastles mixed up and gave £2.7 million meant for the North East city to its namesake in the Potteries.

Newcastle-under-Lyme, population 74,000, was handed the cash instead of Newcastle upon Tyne ...

It's bad enough that the government's thirst for our tax receipts is unquenchable - and now we discover it can't even piss them against the right wall!

And what does it say about the modern civil service that someone could make so basic a mistake: are their efforts solely focused on Scotland and Wales? Is the standard, or perhaps the content, of the modern geography syllabus to blame? Or are there so many bureaucrats employed nowadays that the "Department for Communities and Local Government" is left hiring the dross?

Whatever the explanation, it is a sad comment on the incompetence now endemic in Britain's government that nobody seems to have been surprised by the news ...

They Don't Like It Up 'Em

2008-02-12T21:50:00.000Z

From the money section of the Telegraph comes the following gem:

One of Britain's richest residents says he will leave the country if the Government brings in its controversial new charges for non-domiciles.

Dermot Smurfit, the Irish paper tycoon, is investigating moving to Monte Carlo or Switzerland ...

"This is no easy decision. I have five children in England all at private school — I don't place any burden on the state.

That insulting old canard! The rest of us who pay school fees happen to pay tax as well, Smurfo. And I suppose you use your own personal air traffic control service when you fly in and out on your private plane? And does your limo travel on your special, private road network?

The hideous buffoon ends his preposterous complaining with the following, shocking howler:

I have contributed huge amounts to the country and pay significant taxes, about £150,000 a year.

The article also mentions in passing that moaning parasite Smurfit is worth up to half a billion pounds.

£150,000 in tax in that context is - well - modest, at best. In fact, a UK taxpayer would contribute that amount in PAYE on an annual income of a little over £380,000 - about normal for a senior executive, successful consultant, leading professional, top civil servant etc.

And that's before you add in the VAT, stamp duty, local taxes and other levies that they all pay - and which smug Smurfit has doubtless included in his embarrassing estimate.

If he fancies life up an Alp or on a boat, good luck to him. But he should surely realise that paying £150k in UK tax is a far, far better deal than his fellow residents would get - and so far more than he ever deserved.

A couple of other whining ninnies weigh in towards the end of the piece:

Lord Paul, the Indian-born steel tycoon, who is Gordon Brown's most generous personal backer [funny that] ... Sir Gulam Noon, who has backed Labour with more than £450,000 and was nominated for a peerage by Tony Blair [well, stone the non-doms] ...

I understand that these freeloading billionaires might want to defend their inexcusable tax status. Despite the peerages they bought in the last few years they are clearly without honour and their greed must be insatiable (perhaps they need counselling). But they must realise that to anyone with a brain they're about as sympathetic as Marie Antoinette.

Ah but then, this is the government we're talking about, isn't it ... ?

Non-Dom Nonsense

2008-02-11T13:17:00.000Z

I have already written once about Britain's "non-domiciled residents": people who live here in proliferating numbers while avoiding tax comprising double-figure billions through a loophole which is unique in the world, to the benefit of nobody in this country beyond a select few estate agents, charter companies and West End boutiques.

After a sludge of apologists in the weekend press have tried to defend the indefensible, however - and the Times leads with more drivel this morning - I must return to this grubby, distasteful subject again.

The ill-informed, or downright lying commentators who say non-domiciled status is an important benefit for the economy are most vociferous in their pleading when linking it to high finance.

The notion that the non-dom loophole was somehow relevant to the health of the City began as Labour spin against Conservative proposals to do something about closing it. This is, and always was, the most abject, laughable rubbish.

For those who might be taken in: there are two foundations on which the City rests, and two alone. The first - an accident - is that it is an English-speaking marketplace which fills the inconvenient gap between the Tokyo close and the New York open. No global finance firm could afford not to have a presence in Europe: they all need to take advantage of trading hours during this time.

The second, which began by design and has become a fragile inheritance, is that our marketplace is relatively lightly regulated and flexible. It is this, together with our speaking English, that keeps global finance in the City rather than Amsterdam, Paris or Frankfurt.

Glaringly unfair tax breaks for those who need them least have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

I believe - strongly - in smaller government, lighter regulation and lower taxes (and in no EU as a condition of achieving all three). I also believe in fairness, paying my way and equality under the law, and that's where the non-doms and I part company.

Indeed, as a City worker myself with a foreign-born wife it would benefit me in a narrow sense to take advantage of the non-dom status which some people would have you believe is responsible for keeping me in London. But I don't: I pride myself in my honesty and sense of fairness, and I would be ashamed to.

And besides, there are already a number of ways in which people can legitimately avoid tax and to which I have no objection. The use of family members' allowances, gifting, trusts and so on is perfectly acceptable as these harmless methods of avoidance are open to all of us. If tax avoidance is so important to you there is always non-resident status, too, under which you can not pay any UK tax provided you don't live here for most of the year.

If the government want to bolster the City, they might choose to extend the preferential tax treatment enjoyed by these freebooters to the rest of us who work there. Or they could block all further EU financial market regulations, abolish the FSA and revert to a system of self-regulation under the supervision of the Bank of England, scrap stamp duty on financial transactions (including on property), allow tax relief on financial product development and adopt a flat tax across all forms of income and capital gains.

The first option is unconscionable. The second requires knowledge and courage, two things conspicuously lacking over the last ten years. And the third option - proceeding with the current inequitable and obsolete arrangement - is an insult to the substantial majority of those who work in finance and are not able to take advantage of the loophole, and indeed to all the honest, hard working taxpayers who really keep this country on its feet and represent the body of the British people as a whole.

Even more insulting than the argument that this country's prosperity is in the gift of a few thousand kleptocrats and tax fiddlers is the notion that non-doms make enough of a contribution through the taxes which they do pay and the services they consume.

You pay VAT? Wow! Guess what? So do the rest of us! You use private schools and pay for private medicine? Wow! Guess what? So do the rest of us - and we still pay taxes on top!

Finally, it is worth reiterating a fact which has somehow escaped mention in the media of late. There is one other group in Britain which benefits from the non-doms' presence: the Labour party.

Many of the wealthiest non-doms, whose profits from the loophole are the most immense, are or have been major donors to the government: Lakshmi Mittal, Gulam Noon, Christopher Ondaatje and doubtless many more.

The non-dom tax loophole is a major and growing blight. It is irrelevant to the success of the City; it is unnecessary as there are many other, fairer means of tax avoidance; it is unfair as it allows people to live here permanently without paying their dues like their fellow residents; it is, in short, totally out of place in a respectable, populous, diverse, modern country like the UK.

It should be closed forthwith.

If you are a non-domiciled resident of these islands and you are reading this, you have my sympathy - up to a point. Nobody likes having their candy stolen. But if there were an ounce of honour or integrity in your character, you would either become non-resident (and slither off to some trashy tax haven should you wish), or start paying your way - like everyone else who lives here.

In fact, if they weren't being bribed to keep the loophole open, the government would do well to write to all the non-doms in Britain saying just that. Stump up - or else up stumps to Monaco, or Liechtenstein, where you belong.

UPDATE - Read ludicrous non-dom whingeing about losing the right to live here permanently tax free - here!

Turbulent Priests

2008-02-07T17:10:00.000Z

Climate change notwithstanding, thinking man's beardie Dr Rowan Williams whipped up a storm earlier today when he opined that Islamic law should be adopted in the UK.

At the same time, it emerged that colourful Islamist cleric Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi will not be allowed into Britain on a medical visa.

Dr al-Qaradawi appears to have fallen victim to David Cameron's taunting of Gordon Brown last week, though the Conservatives bear no responsibility for the Archbishop's views expressed on a BBC programme this afternoon.

There has already been a deal of comment about both of these clergymen, not least from the agreeably predictable Muslim Council of Britain (who are for Dr Williams and against the exclusion of Dr al-Qaradawi).

I agree with them that it would have been preferable to have admitted al-Qaradawi. We should have allowed him a platform and then afforded him medical care in prison should he have abused it. After all, though the danger from "preachers of hate" has been all too apparent for some time, we have nothing to fear from words in themselves.

Indeed, freedom of speech is important. What Dr Williams has clarified is that it is now equally vital in the case of both priests that we absolutely disregard what they have to say.

European Constitutions

2008-02-05T20:03:00.000Z

With the connivance of the "Liberal" "Democrats" it looks likely that Britain will ratify the Lisbon treaty soon. The recent collapse of the Italian government, however, together with Belgium's ongoing political crisis raises the question: do the polities of Continental Europe really deserve to have any influence at all over the constitutional affairs of the United Kingdom?

In answering this question it is instructive to consider the constitutional pedigree of our European neighbours. In no particular order, here is a list of the dozen other EU member states with populations of over 10 million people, together with the form of their government, the date at which their constitution was adopted and the form of government which they enjoyed previously:

Italy - republic with constitution dating from 1948. Formerly a dictatorship.
France - republic with constitution dating from 1958. Formerly an occupied territory.
Germany - federal republic with constitution dating from 1949. Formerly a dictatorship.
Spain - constitutional monarchy with constitution dating from 1978. Formerly a dictatorship.
Greece - republic with constitution dating from 1975. Formerly a dictatorship.
Belgium - federated constitutional monarchy with constitution dating from 1993 (further changes pending). Formerly an occupied territory.
Holland - constitutional monarchy with constitution dating from 1815 (thoroughly revised in 1983). Formerly a vassal state of France.
Portugal - republic with constitution dating back to 1976. Formerly a dictatorship.
Poland - republic with constitution dating from 1997. Formerly a vassal state of the USSR.
Romania - republic with constitution dating from 1991 (thoroughly revised in 2003). Formerly a vassal state of the USSR.
Czech Republic - republic with constitution dating from 1992. Formerly a vassal state of the USSR.
Hungary - republic with constitution dating from 1949 (thoroughly revised 1989-90). Formerly a vassal state of the USSR.

Not a hugely impressive record, is it? A collection of former dictatorships, occupied territories and puppet states with an average political age of 44 - and that's with being pretty generous to the Netherlands and Hungary.

This is not to be xenophobic, of course: simply Britannophilic. England was a united kingdom as far back as the early 10th century; constitutionally, our common law dates from at least the mid-twelfth century, our written constitution began with Magna Carta in 1215, and our parliamentary democracy dates from later in the 13th century.

And needless to say, there has not been a battle in Britain since 1746, nor a dictatorship since 1660, nor an occupation since 1066.

So while we have an enormous amount to learn from our Continental friends and allies, many of whom are of course old and venerable countries, about all sorts of other things, the idea that they have anything at all to teach us about our constitution is nothing short of lunatic.

Indeed, if the EU were a body which listened rather than dictated, we might have a good deal to teach it. But then, Europe has a fine tradition of dictatorship, doesn't it?

Predicting The Unpredictable

2008-02-04T16:15:00.000Z

Bugged by the bugging (non-)story and with little other news of interest, now is the time to reiterate my unequivocal prediction that Hillary Clinton will secure the Democratic presidential nomination and begin next year in the White House.

With the polls showing a dead heat between her and Barack Obama this is as bold a forecast as when I first made it (in the immediate aftermath of Obama's decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses). I have three reasons for sticking to my guns:

1) On the evidence of the New Hampshire result, opinion polls may be understating the level of support for Senator Clinton.

2) While the record turnout seen in the Democratic primaries has had no clear beneficiary so far, my guess is that with Obama having attracted all the momentum this year and closed what was once an unassailable poll lead for Clinton, the fear of losing among Clinton supporters will prove a more powerful emotion than the hope of winning in the other camp.

3) The presidential primaries represent a gruelling contest for the highest political office in America. They will be won by the best politician - defined as cynically as you like - available to the country at the time. That's Clinton.

It's the last point which lay behind my initial call, and while I'd be happy to be proved wrong I don't think Obama's time has come just yet.

Misappropriating Public Money

2008-02-01T17:19:00.000Z

The disgrace of Derek Conway has indeed been a sorry affair. Its most interesting aspect for me has been the way in which every report has mentioned that he embezzled taxpayers money (e.g. Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail).

This is presumably harped on because it is supposed to make his offence more lurid. By this logic it is not the fact that Conway is an MP and a fraud which is so opprobrious as that he is an MP and a plunderer of the public purse.

I agree that it is deplorable that taxpayer's money should be misappropriated. What makes me even more angry than the case of Mr Conway is that this has become the business of half the government. (I recently discovered the excellent "Burning Our Money" blog which carries egregious examples of how taxpayers' money is abused almost daily, e.g. here.)

Why should I as a taxpayer really be any more angry that part of the money which is taken from me by the state goes to subsidise an undergraduate's nights out rather than, say, the Health and Safety Executive's recent ladder amnesty, or the Learning and Skills Council's report on the possibility of establishing a trade body for equality and diversity professionals?

By all means let us castigate Derek Conway for his grasping, underhanded and dishonest behaviour. But how absurd that most of us have also been bemoaning his embezzlement of public money while tacitly conniving in our enormous government doing exactly the same thing on an infinitely grander scale every day.

As a postscript, I note that the Mail's coverage contains a clue as to why Conway's affairs might have been brought to the public's attention to begin with:

He has been in the Commons since 1983 and in recent months has been talked of as a future Speaker.

Not any more.

Labour Gives Up On Governing Britain

2008-01-29T15:58:00.000Z

From today's Telegraph:

Labour has admitted it had abandoned its historic commitment to eliminate mixed-sex wards from NHS hospitals.

Health minister Lord Darzi of Denham told the House of Lords that the key manifesto pledge repeated in 1997 and 2001 was "an aspiration that cannot be met".

These people have had more than ten years to implement this commitment. Obviously they've been far too busy lecturing us on the perils of the Demon Drink and the virtues of a government-approved diet to sort out the expensive mess they've made of actually running the health department.

In fact, all our politicians at the moment seem to be thoroughly transfixed by tit-for-tat accusations of financial impropriety against Alan Johnson, Derek Conway and a host of others.

Given that this is what most of them seem to enjoy best, and is doubtless the most that many of them are capable of, perhaps it isn't surprising that the tedious and complex business of running the country can end up being neglected for a decade.

Maybe if we paid everyone in Westminster and Whitehall to do nothing for a year or two, things might improve. As it is the country is sinking under the combined weight of their interventionism and incompetence.

What Drink Problem?

2008-01-23T17:03:00.000Z

Another month, another story about Britain's alcohol "problem".

This time it's the news that a change in the way units are measured means that record numbers of us are drinking more than the (revised) safe limits. As the Telegraph reports:

The figures show 31 per cent of men - 7.1 million - are drinking at hazardous levels ... Twenty per cent of women, or 4.9 million, are classed as hazardous drinkers ...

As the report doesn't point out, the logic here is absurd. If I decide to increase the length of an inch by 20%, it doesn't make me thinner.

Funnily enough, exactly this point is made by the good old Office of National Statistics in the press summary of its latest household survey (where the figures ultimately come from):

It should be noted, however, that changing the way in which alcohol consumption estimates are derived does not in itself reflect a real change in drinking among the adult population.

Indeed. Furthermore, on the basis of figures compiled using old unit values which can thus be compared to previous years:

The proportion of men drinking more than 21 units a week on average fell from 29 per cent in 2000 to 23 per cent in 2006. There was also a fall in the proportion of women drinking more than 14 units a week (from 17 per cent in 2000 to 12 per cent in 2006).

The fact is, then, that alcohol consumption is falling in Britain among men and women and has been doing for some time.

This might in part be because British guidelines on safe levels of consumption have been revised down over the last 30 years to become some of the most restrictive in the world.

Far from being a drinker's paradise in which alcohol abuse is spiralling out of control, we are a relatively sober nation - and getting drier all the time.

Sadly, this is not the message you will be hearing from our sensationalist media. Witness last summer's hysteria over binge drinking amongst young people: complete rubbish, as this week's ONS data shows that alcohol consumption has been falling steadily among 16-24 year olds too.

The government already intends to stigmatise drinking. They are being lobbied to do so by a powerful new consortium of health fascists. The media should be reporting the facts - attacking and not helping this unholy alliance impose itself upon us in the name of a problem which is entirely fictional.

It's enough to make you turn to drink.

Gordon The Joker

2008-01-21T17:08:00.000Z

It would appear from his speech in New Delhi today that our prime minister has lost none of his fabled sense of humour:

The World Bank needed to strengthen its focus on poverty reduction, while also becoming "a bank for the environment", involving a multi-billion pound global climate change fund to finance low-carbon investment, he said.

Mr Brown argued that the IMF should focus on surveillance of the global economic and financial system to prevent crises, such as that affecting Northern Rock in the UK.

Ha! Ha! And this on a day which also saw the latest uncertain proclamation from the "Tripartite Authorities" on that very debacle.

If a man can't serve two masters, the Rock crisis certainly shows that a bank can't serve tripartite authorities. It would be nice to think that Brown had learned this lesson, and in the process had time to reflect on the dire consequences of adding an unnecessary dose of untested government (the FSA) to fix a system of informed and credible self-regulation in the City that wasn't broken.

But - no. More government is always the solution to psychologies such as Brown's, and the bigger the better. A local banking failure which the Bank of England could have pre-empted with a forced takeover behind the scenes became a national embarrassment as its division of responsibilities with the Treasury and Britain's new "super-regulator" paralysed decision making. Imagine where we'd be if we'd have had to wait on the opinion of the IMF too!

How very droll. Still, the international stand-up circuit doubtless beats being in parliament for important constitutional debates ...

Fathead

2008-01-20T18:13:00.000Z

The Rt Hon Alan Johnson, MP, Secretary of State for Health, warns us in the Times today that Britain is facing an epidemic.

Needless to say, this is something of an exaggeration. Were people dying in huge numbers from bird flu, BSE or whatever other voguish terror, we would have read about it on the front page rather than in a motley columnette at the foot of page 94.

What Mr Johnson meant was the obesity epidemic, which is to say the government doesn't like how chubby we are.

Lest we forget why this is any of the government's business, it is of course out of public largesse that the shining beacon of global excellence that is the NHS deigns to treat us when we fall ill. It must be terribly galling for our lords and masters such as Mr Johnson to contemplate having to waste even more of the government's money treating us for conditions which we could avoid simply by allowing them to dictate the minutiae of how we live. As he himself puts it:

It is not the government's job to hector or lecture, but it is our duty to give people clear and transparent information, and to help and support them in their endeavours to make sure they and their children can pursue a healthy lifestyle.

This has ominous echoes of a speech made two years ago by Patricia Hewitt, then also Secretary of State for Health, who later went on to suggest denying certain treatments to the overweight, among others.

People increasingly know that their health depends on what they do themselves, not just on what the NHS does for them. But they want government helping and supporting them ...

These formulations clearly derive from some civil service lexicon to be deployed whenever it is suggested that our absurd health bureaucracy is overreaching itself. I'm not so sure we'll be that easily fooled: the word "supporting" is pretty obviously being used in the sense of "the Inquisition is committed to supporting the decision of heretics in Spain to recant", or "the Hitler administration is actively engaged in supporting the relocation of the Reich's Jewish community."

A better answer than mass popular indoctrination and control would be to introduce charging for certain weight-related treatments. Those who consume more healthcare resources as a result of their intemperate ballooning would therefore still have the option of getting treatment and the rest of us would not be burdened unfairly.

To charge rather than deny could become a new general principle of British healthcare, ultimately perhaps bringing about accountability, decentralisation and a real transfer of power to patients - and away from the Heath Department and its offensive designs on the freedom of the people of this country.

In the meantime, I have a suggestion whereby Mr Johnson might afford us at least a temporary respite from governmental hectoring and control.

The peoples of Tonga, Fiji and the rest of the Pacific islands, where obesity has been prevalent for many years for partly cultural reasons, would doubtless welcome a fact-finding mission from Britain. The Health Secretary might find he enjoys it, and the departure of Peter Hain from government in the not-too-distant future will in any case require new ministerial representation by the permanently tanned.

I'm sure it would beat cobbling together embarrassing, illiberal cant for the weekend press.

Russia: Are We Facing Reality At Last?

2008-01-17T16:15:00.000Z

As I noted when our Foreign Secretary announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats back in July, our bafflingly cack-handed diplomacy towards Russia is of a piece with a foreign policy which has degenerated into a complete shambles.

Before turning to Labour's shamefaced climbdown today, let us remind ourselves of the sequence of events.

In 2000, Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, flees from a Russian jail sentence and is given asylum in London. He joins the circle of billionaire Russian dissident Boris Berezovsky (link).
In November of 2006 Litvinenko is murdered in London by exotic means in a case which transfixes the nation (link).
In May the following year, British authorities identify Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB agent, as their prime suspect and request his extradition to face trial in the UK (link).
A month later, the Russians refuse the extradition request. This was widely expected as the extradition of a Russian citizen is against that country's constitution.They leave the door open to a joint Anglo-Russian prosecution of Mr Lugovoi in Russia (link).
On 16 July the new Foreign Secretary overreacts absurdly, announcing the expulsion of four Russian diplomats "to bring home to the Russian Government the consequences of their failure to co-operate", while acknowledging that Russia had no treaty obligation to grant the British extradition request (link).
Russia responds with anger and incredulity, pointing out that Britain had refused twenty-one of her extradition requests in the recent past. (link).
Soon afterwards, Russia responds with a tit-for-tat expulsion. Relations between the two countries have now reached a post-Cold War low (link).
In December, Russia further retaliates by demanding that most of the British Council's offices in Russia be closed (link).
Later the same month, Russia threatens to withhold pictures from an exhibition planned for London's Royal Academy of Art over fears that British law would permit ownership claims to prevent their return. (link).
As 2008 begins, Britain defies the Russian demand to close British Council offices. Staff from the offices are subsequently questioned by the FSB (link).

And now the risible Mr Miliband has been forced into a grudging climbdown in parliament:

He said cultural activities should not become "a political football" so he had decided not to take similar actions against Russian activities in the UK and said the British Council would continue its work in Moscow.

He added: "Russia's actions against the British Council are a stain on Russian's reputation and standing."

What, Mr Miliband? Not expelling any more diplomats? Not imposing sanctions? Declaring war?

Needless to say, Miliband's feeble whining was echoed by both other parties. Can they really be so stupid as to have missed the story here - that the British government overreached itself absurdly (not to say dangerously), and at last has realised it had to back down?

To recap for a moment: Britain is a lovely, wealthy, reasonably powerful country with a high-tax, high-spend economy and a weak government with no will to use military power against its enemies. Russia is an anarchic, paranoid, powerful country with huge surplus energy earnings and a hard line president who enjoys a domestic following of which other elected politicians can only dream.

In other words, pick a fight with Russia and we were only ever going to lose. Add to that the fact we had little or no cause for the fight and you have one of the foreign policy conundrums of the decade.

(As I've said before, compare this simply to our disgraceful appeasement of Iran last spring, a medieval basket case and pariah guilty of an act of war whom we have the power to crush utterly but were happy to let off without so much as a single expelled diplomat ... )

The Foreign Office should have been able to tell Miliband this. Indeed, if you want a conspiracy theory, they might have encouraged their callow leader in his ludicrous sabre-rattling antics to defend themselves against Labour's swingeing cutbacks:

"Diplomatic crisis, Secretary of State? Oh dear me, but if only we hadn't had to pare back our Russian coverage, perhaps we might have been able to discover some means of forfending it ... "

Either way, it looks as though the British government is now facing facts, and I for one fervently hope this is the last we will hear of a "new Cold War" with an interesting as well as powerful neighbour from constructive engagement with whom we should rightly continue to profit.

Charity Begins At School

2008-01-16T17:29:00.000Z

In widely, if wearily anticipated news, the Charity Commission has announced its intention to interfere in the running of this country's so-called "independent" schools.

The Charity Commission is publishing guidance which will require charities to demonstrate that they are not "exclusive clubs" ... "There is a two-way relationship between charities and society - registered charities enjoy considerable benefits in terms of their reputation and the tax advantages that go with their status," said the Charity Commission's chairman, Suzi Leather.

Note to Ms Leather: they aren't clubs, they're schools. And if you have a problem with exclusivity, why not pick on - say - guide dogs for the blind? What have they ever done for the sighted majority?

As to reputation, I doubt that Eton or Westminster would suffer much damage on that front from anything that Ms Leather and her band of class warriors could possibly say or do.

That goes for the tax breaks too, actually. The figure of £100m in lost reliefs would hardly touch the sides of an industry with an annual turnover of over £6bn. (If spread evenly across all schools, the loss could be compensated for by a 1.6% increase in fees.)

So the Commission may talk loudly, but it carries only a tiny, withered little stick.

I doubt very much whether those involved have any idea what it is they're attacking either: quite simply, the best schools in the world.

An OECD survey called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) from 2006 surveyed 15-year-old schoolchildren across 57 countries and awarded points for their skills in reading, maths and science. While Britain's state schools scored around the 500-point average in the three areas, our independent sector, with scores of 576, 570 and 598 respectively (data), beat the top country in each category: Korea in reading (556), Taiwan in maths (549) and Finland in science (563) (tables).

In fact, I'd like to see our private schools call the Charity Commission's bluff. Renounce their charitable status. It's simply not worth the candle.

Who knows - perhaps a proliferation of deregulated private schools would result, which over time would drag the average standard of British education back up again - rather than levelling it down.

Knowing When To Quit

2008-01-15T14:14:00.000Z

From today's Telegraph:

A police officer has been forced into resigning after he gave a Muslim colleague a pack of bacon and a bottle of wine as a joke present during a Christmas Day party.

Pc Rob Murrie gave the gift to his colleague as part of a "Secret Santa" at Luton station ... However, even though the Muslim officer did not complain and thought the present funny, senior officers in the Bedfordshire force were not amused. They declared that "behaviour of this nature is not tolerated" and welcomed Pc Murrie's resignation.

The 26-year-old officer said he had "no choice but to resign" - after six years in the force - given the current politically correct climate in policing ...

Shishu Miah, general secretary of the Bedford Jame Mosque, said: "I do not condone what he did but the officer clearly made an error of judgment and should be forgiven."

It would appear that Luton's Muslim community does not feel it requires the cultural patronage of its local nick, and that is gratifying. It is a shame that the "senior officers" concerned do not take note of this, temper their vicarious sensitivity and reinstate Mr Murrie.

The episode is even more puzzling in the light of the aversion to resigning displayed by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner (and de facto head of the police in Britain), Sir Ian Blair. We all chortle to remember how this affable figurehead joked about his toughness and limpet-like qualities after his force mob-handedly gunned down an innocent foreign national going about his legitimate private business on the streets of our capital city.

Jean Charles de Menezes was killed; Arshad Mahmood received a joke present of some bacon. And while the most senior officer of them all can go on the radio and make merry at his own brazenness, the minions who actually do the policing are evidently expected to fall on their swords at the drop of a hat.

The police should be less worried about the legacy left by "institutional racism" and more concerned with this institutional fatheadedness and injustice. The fact that Blair is staying and Murrie has gone shows that their priorities are exactly the wrong way round.

Heroism Then, And Now

2008-01-14T15:25:00.000Z

This weekend the world saluted the life of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest, who died on Friday at the age of 88. As the Telegraph's excellent obituary records:

The Himalayas were very much more remote than they now are when Hillary first visited them in 1951.

Indeed. In fact, so many people have scaled the summit since that regular clean-up climbs have to be mounted, much to the chagrin of older explorers. You can even book a guided climb over the internet.

Climbing the mountain remains fraught with risk, and people still die in the attempt. But the riskiest ascent was, of course, the first:

Hillary led George Lowe and George Band up the Khumbu icefall - perhaps the most dangerous part of the entire climb - and established Camp III, the advanced base camp, in the West Cwm.

But he had a narrow escape when the ice gave way as he was moving loads up to this camp, plunging him into a crevasse. Fortunately Tenzing, who was following, thrust his ice-axe in the snow, and whipped the rope round it in good belay. It tightened just in time to prevent Hillary being smashed to pieces at the bottom of the crevasse.

In other news, Paul Waugh, a heroic coastguard who rescued a 13-year-old girl stranded on a North Sea cliff, quit his job.

Despite receiving an award for his bravery, and being credited by the girl he rescued with saving her life, his bosses at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency chose only to censure him for his recklessness. When he resigned - citing "immense pressure" from his superiors and claiming they had even put him under investigation - they had the following to say:

The MCA is very mindful of health and safety regulations which are in place for very good reasons ... our responsibility is to maintain the health and welfare of those who we sometimes ask to go out in difficult and challenging conditions to effect rescues.

The MCA is not looking for dead heroes. As such, we ask our volunteers to risk assess the situations they and the injured or distressed person find themselves in, and to ensure that whatever action they take does not put anyone in further danger.

Hang on. If nobody was prepared to put themselves in harm's way - or jeopardise their "health and welfare" in the jargon of the bureaucrats - no rescues would ever take place! Forbid danger and you prevent heroism; it is, by definition, not something which can be made safe.

The health-and-safety crowd have long disgraced themselves with such nonsense as advising people how to climb ladders and banning ways of remembering the dead. When their hysterical (and in this case deeply illogical) diktats start to menace the living, however, it really is time for us to throw them over.

What would Sir Edmund Hillary have made of it? If there had existed the same jumble of regulations and risk assessments in the 50s, perhaps he would have stuck to keeping bees.

Bongkers

2008-01-09T17:14:00.000Z

Back in July, Gordon Brown announced the second government consultation on cannabis reclassification in as many years. Though it will be a couple of months before this is complete, the government is now apparently testing the waters on reclassifying the drug as Class B, regardless of what its own review says.

To recap: in 2001, then Home Secretary David Blunkett decided to reclassify cannabis as a Class C substance, which if the law were properly enforced (and it isn't) would have had some impact on maximum sentencing and so forth.

This decision was so controversial it was timidly held over until 2004.

In 2006, new Home Secretary Charles Clarke dithered over reclassification and announced a review. This, however, recommended no further change. A second period of dithering, bringing its own review, was begun by even newer Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and - here we are.

And yet we are told that the latest episode of confused, paralytic vacillation over drugs policy represents a "tough stance" from Gordon Brown.

The fact is that the government won't have a "stance" on cannabis at all until it has enough feedback from the hints it's been dropping today to decide what it might be more popular for it to be seen to be doing. In the meantime, two no doubt costly reviews may or may not be ignored for the sake of a U-turn which may or may not be made in the matter of a trap the government managed to lay for itself a few short years ago.

Surely even the most spaced out wacko in Britain couldn't mistake this for leadership?

The Crackdown That Wasn't

2008-01-08T17:16:00.000Z

In news today:

Almost half the colleges checked on an official list of approved providers for overseas students have been struck off, the government has said.

Following fears about bogus colleges, the government said it had inspected 256 colleges since 2005, leading to 124 being removed from the list.

Good news! Student visas are a notorious loophole in migration policy. Perhaps the government might be doing something to address its hopelessly shambolic mismanagement of this important area of national life.

Or so you might think.

As the BBC went on to report:

There are about 2,000 private colleges on the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills' register ... [it] remains unclear how many of the remaining 1,750 colleges have ever been physically inspected before or after inclusion on this register.

Among those currently on the list is a college whose website content is mostly links to services including online gambling.

This isn't at all surprising when it appears from the FAQ section of the DIUS Register website that the department relies in large part on complaints about bogus colleges from the public which it then passes on to the Home Office.

So we have some way to go before the government fulfils David Blunkett's commitment to "crack down" on bogus colleges made back in 2004. And why did he announce the crackdown?

In 2000, entry and visa procedures were streamlined [sic] ... Baroness Blackstone, a higher education minister, announced that immigration officials would now normally give students permission to stay for the full duration of the course rather than six months when they arrived. They would not now have to seek permission from job centres to work part-time during terms or full-time in the holidays, and spouses and dependants would also be able to work here.

Marvellous. The government took a loophole, expanded it, waited a few years, realised it had caused chaos, announced a "crack down" and introduced a limp registration system to solve the problem.

What we now discover is that the problem has not been remotely solved, that half of these approved colleges are in fact ticket kiosks allowing people into the country for money and that the modest purge associated with this discovery is presented as some kind of success.

Worth 40% of anyone's GDP.

The Year Ahead

2008-01-07T14:35:00.000Z

Having opened this blog exactly one year ago with a series of predictions for 2007 - most of which turned out reasonably well - the season now demands a similar list for 2008.

At Home

A slowdown in housing puts pressure on the British consumer and the economy flirts with recession
The government forces the Lisbon treaty through parliament, causing controversy and depending on the Liberal Democrats for support
Momentum continues to build behind David Cameron and the Conservatives cement their political ascendancy
For these and other reasons there is a challenge to the prime minister's leadership of the Labour party
A somewhat cold (or warm) winter, followed by a somewhat cool (or hot) summer, are taken as incontrovertible evidence of climate change by the Met Office and the media establishment

Abroad

Despite a shaky start to her campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton goes on to win the Democratic nomination and be elected the 44th president of the United States of America
No military action is taken against Iran, which continues to enrich uranium in defiance of the international community leaving the door open to an Iranian bomb
Castro dies
The Beijing Olympics give the world an education in Chinese totalitarianism as protests over human rights abuses and environmental policy are suppressed and huge numbers of ordinary Chinese displaced for the games
The EU fails to have its accounts signed off by its auditors amid continued fraud, embezzlement and non-compliance with financial reporting standards for the 14th successive year

As before, I will keep track of these predictions as the year progresses. I hope it's a good one for you!

Send Us Your Photos

2008-01-06T17:48:00.000Z

In news from Holland, an Iranian artist has had her work suppressed by a Dutch museum for depicting "gay Iranian exiles in masks of Muhammad, the founder of Islam".

She accused the director of the municipal museum in The Hague of cowardice for caving in to Muslim extremists ... "They said to me, 'We're going to burn you naked or put a bullet in your mouth'," she said, referring to menacing e-mails.

Luckily for Sooreh Hera - the adopted name of the artist concerned - there is a gallery in Britain which would be happy to accommodate her.

She should arrange for her pictures to be exhibited at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. For only today we are told that the gallery

has offended Christians and visitors alike by displaying a statue showing Christ with an erection ... The Baltic says it has no plans to remove the offending work.

Quite right - and how refreshing to see such a robust defence of freedom of artistic expression.

So I would encourage the Baltic Centre to mount an exhibition of Hera's work as soon as possible. After all, a gallery which has so bravely faced down its Christian critics should have nothing to fear.

Links

2007-12-28T11:38:00.000Z

99% of the time I have available to spend on this site is taken up with writing posts, but one thing I'm determined to get round to early in the New Year is revising - and hopefully expanding - the list of links I carry to other blogs.

If you have a political blog and would like to exchange links, please add a comment to this post or drop me an email (address link on "About Me" page) with your URL.

I'm going away for the New Year but am hoping to return to posting by the end of next week.

Best wishes for 2008!

Drawing To A Close

2007-12-24T11:24:00.000Z

Now that this blog is almost a year old, it is time to review the predictions I made in my very first post.

Labour are destroyed in May's elections. The party draws a line under the disaster by handing power to Gordon. A raft of new initiatives, targets, 10 year plans, taskforces and reports follows. Gordon's lack of warmth sees the esteem in which the party is held diminish further.

Well, I was dead right about the elections, the handover and the rest: a good result for Prediction No.1! The only thing I failed to anticipate was that it would be Brown's incompetence and inadequacy which would ultimately do for him rather than his repellent persona.

The Tories' policies remain either hidden or indistinguishable from Labour's. With Gordon in charge, however, their "Dave = Tony" strategy begins to pay off.

This proved too harsh: Cameron's policy machine has produced good, solid material on education, crime and migration (though it did threaten to come unstuck by embracing fundamentalist environmentalism). Indeed, Labour have taken to copying Conservative ideas ever more flagrantly.

For this and other reasons, though, the Tory strategy has evidently turned the corner, so I'll give myself five out of ten for Prediction 2.

One way or another, Ming goes.

Not a tricky one, perhaps, but right nonetheless! The last two domestic predictions presented easy victories as well:

A raft of statistics is published to show beyond all argument that health, education, law and order and life in general have never been better in this country, and are improving all the time.

Government spending increases.

Turning to the international scene, I had the following to say about the climate change circus:

The IPCC publishes its latest report. Things are found to be getting worse faster than the last report envisaged. Governments are entreated to take more drastic action and sooner than before.

This was inevitable, of course. What I didn't predict was the apotheosis of Al Gore after his Oscar triumph in February. What further proof could we require that the climate change bandwagon represents a chaotic and unpredictable system?

The US and / or Israel take action to prevent Iran turning nuclear, and are roundly condemned for doing so.

I did have military action in mind when I wrote this, so the imposition of unilateral sanctions by America shouldn't really count - I was wrong on this one. Given the recent intelligence debacle over the Iranian nuclear programme in the States, coupled with 2008 being an election year, I may not carry this prediction forward.

Which means I might be predicting a nuclear-capable Iranian theocracy for next year. I'll have a think about that over the next few days!

Le Pen polls record numbers in the election for the French presidency.

The one I got most wrong. The French elections were in fact a model for democracies everywhere.

More lives are claimed in the Middle East, in Africa, in Europe, in North America, in South Asia and in the Far East by Islamist criminality and terrorism.

Another easy score here. We have managed to avoid a major atrocity, however, and that superlative triumph for the vigilance of our security services merits our profound gratitude.

The EU Commission fails to have its accounts signed off by its auditors.

Dead right: the Court of Auditors announced in November that the EU remained a financial disaster area for the 13th year running.

Not a bad year for the Elliott Joseph crystal ball. In a few days I'll dust it off to see what 2008 might hold.

In the meantime, I wish all readers a very Merry Christmas!

The Greedy Gene

2007-12-23T17:05:00.000Z

In news today, celebrity zoologist and hobby theologian Richard Dawkins is shortly to embark on a tour of the US.

Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion has sold 1.5m copies in the English language, has teamed up with Robin Wight, the man behind some of Britain’s most memorable advertising campaigns, to make it respectable to admit to being an atheist.

No presidential candidate could hope to survive in the polls in America if he or she admitted to doubts about the existence of God.

The opposite state of affairs pertains in Britain, of course, where the prime minister was afraid to use the G-word lest we think him a "nutter".

Dawkins himself had the following to say:

The Bible Belt is a lot less monolithic than it portrays itself. I have a feeling that there is rather a large groundswell of people who agree with me ... People thank me for speaking out. They are grateful that I articulate what they wish to say but can’t because they live there ... We do see an analogy with gay rights. There are a lot of people in the closet in America."

Can he be serious? As someone who taught at Berkeley (and joined in protests against the Vietnam war) in the 1960s he must know that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech.

As to being "in the closet", that same Amendment additionally guarantees freedom of religion and insists upon the separation of church and state. A country with a two hundred year history of secular pluralism is a funny place to look for oppression of conscience.

Of course, if he was really interested in addressing the repression of atheism, he could try a lecture tour of the Sudan or Saudi, but I can't see it somehow. Still - why America?

Could it just be that his latest book comes out in paperback in the US in January? And one assumes that the ~~book promotion~~ "lecture tour" itself will involve the sale of tickets.

He wouldn't be the first Brit to raise a little financing this way, of course. But it does seem odd to dress up a marketing exercise as some kind of moral crusade.

Isn't that what Dawkins would say the Victorian missionaries were up to?

The 1990s All Over Again

2007-12-20T16:09:00.000Z

Charles Clarke sticks the knife into Brown. The prime minister - playing the big man at his news conference yesterday - takes the stabbing with a smile.

What are we to make of this?

Another Labour backbencher Andrew Mackinlay, Thurrock MP, agreed that there was concern over Mr Brown's leadership within the party. "There is some disappointment, particularly from the election that never was. There’s a degree of concern but I wouldn't want to exaggerate it. I deliberately use the word disappointment rather than despair."

In addition to the sniping from disaffected Blairites when Brown first stumbled, it seems there is now genuine heat from the broader parliamentary party.

A split on Europe, a poor performance in the polls and now mounting pressure on the party leader .. Gordon Brown cannot possibly mistake these echoes of the Major period. They will not be music to his ears.

The Lisbon Treaty: Nick Clegg's Moment

2007-12-18T17:03:00.000Z

Back in October I weighted the prospects for ratifying the Lisbon treaty in the light of a backbench Labour rebellion likely to be significant. Would there be a referendum? What about a defeat in parliament? My view was, and is, that the Liberal Democrats hold the key:

Would they rein in their Europhilia for the sake of embarrassing the government (as Paddy Ashdown so memorably did during the ratification of Maastricht in 1993)? After all, though Ming ruled it out before his then party's conference, most Lib Dem voters want a referendum on the "reform treaty". Would they really be happy seeing it simply nodded through by their MPs?

Today's selection of Nick Clegg to lead this ordinarily irrelevant political ragbag leaves us none the wiser.

In a piece for his Guardian diary written when he was an MEP, Clegg made a passionate call for a referendum on the Giscard document when his party adopted that policy four years ago. A few months earlier, he made another referendum call in the leftist media, this time on taking the UK into the eurozone (which he favoured).

Yet during his recent leadership campaign he ruled a referendum on the Lisbon treaty out point blank.

Perhaps Clegg's confusion on the matter is down to straightforward muddy thinking. In another of his diary pieces, this time from 2005, he laid into Tony Blair for trying to negotiate CAP reform and "clinging on to the UK rebate", while advocating a "reformist, liberal approach to European integration" in the same breath.

The only thing which is clear from his writing is that the man is head over heels in love with Brussels. Whether he will show a similar regard for the wishes of the British people remains to be seen.

Too Cynical

2007-12-17T17:33:00.000Z

Reading an article in yesterday's Times about Tony Blair's earning power as a speaker, the following comment - from one of the organisers of his forthcoming US lecture tour - caught my eye:

His Middle East peace role will ensure he remains in demand for years to come.

Blair's sudden announcement of his peace envoy role did come as something of a surprise. Previous speculation as to what he might do after Number Ten included a senior UN or EU position - his Middle East mission appeared a comparatively obscure choice.

Surely it would be too cynical to suggest that Blair took the Middle East job because he knew it would boost his value on the American lecture circuit? Could he really be that venal?

More On Criminal Justice

2007-12-12T17:08:00.000Z

The official response to the sad case of Andrew Mournian has been remarkable.

Mr Mournian, a convicted woman beater on early release, murdered his girlfriend Amanda Murphy only days after quitting prison. According to reports she was so badly disfigured by his fatal assault that the old cliche was in her case literally true: her own mother didn't recognise her.

Now, according to the BBC coverage

Mr Straw was asked about the case in the House of Commons by Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Herbert ... "The senior High Court judge, Mrs Justice Swift ... said she did not believe that the defendant's early release had led to Miss Murphy's death, and she went on to say that the defendant would have carried out the attack whenever he was released."

Whether you think that Mournian was a victim of alcohol and society or the worst kind of criminal scum - or both - it is indisputable fact that he would not have killed Ms Murphy if he were still in jail. Mrs Justice Swift was therefore gloriously, barkingly and incontrovertibly wrong.

Even more shocking was the decision of New Labour's consummate political survivor to seek shelter in her observation that "the defendant would have carried out the attack whenever he was released." To a sane person, that is an argument for keeping someone in prison indefinitely. Modern British justice, by contrast, evidently takes the boggling view that as we're releasing killers back into society it might as well be sooner rather than later.

In seemingly unrelated news, the children's minister yesterday announced his massively detailed ten-year plan for British education. But even amid this huge load of Balls lies a proposal to send fewer teens to court for offences

likely to include minor vandalism ... shoplifting and low-level assault.

Does the ludicrous Balls not worry that leaving "low-level assault" by young thugs unpunished will mean more Mournian-type attacks in the future? Does he think about such things at all?

The Balls scheme and the Mournian early release both have the same root cause. As I have written many times before, at over 99% of their operational capacity our prisons are full to bursting (figures here). This also goes for young offender institutions (though they are technically a mere 96% full - figures).

The only proper solution is for us to build more prisons. Only a complete moron - or possibly a justice secretary or high court judge - could think otherwise.

Not-So-Dumb Britain

2007-12-11T17:03:00.000Z

Once in a while an opinion poll comes along to suggest that modern Britain isn't as morbid a prospect as you've been led to believe. The media might paint your fellow citizens as committed enviro-loonies who believe in high taxation, government control and Old Labour, but just as you're packing your bags some poll data catches your eye and you realise they're not so crazy after all and the whole emigration plan can be reconsidered.

So it was with news yesterday that 73% of us want to see a referendum on the EU Reform Treaty.

Not just the elderly; not just the Conservatives; not just anybody. Seventy-three per cent.

The poll, conducted by ICM, was commissioned by Global Vision, "a non-partisan campaign group that believes Britain needs to negotiate a looser, more modern relationship with the EU."

Even more gratifying than the headline figure on support for a referendum was the response to the question, "If the UK could have the ideal relationship with Europe, which of the following would you yourself prefer?" It's worth looking at the detail yourself, but the highlights for me were as follows:

A small minority wants our relationship with the EU to stay as it is.
The most popular choice was for a looser arrangement based on free trade with no political union.
For each social category, age group and gender - whatever way you break the responses down - those of us wanting a freer EU and those wanting full withdrawal outnumber those in favour of the current setup by two to one.

So why on earth do our political leaders persist in damning us to further "integration" (subjugation, actually)?

It is obvious why a vainglorious politician, intoxicated by the prospect of VIP rank in a superstate of 500m people, might learn to despise the meagre interests of a more modest 61m. (I call this the Heseltine Complex after one of its more egregious archetypes.)

Even if we can't rely on the wisdom of our representatives, however, we might surely hope to rely on their survival instinct.

It's our votes that employ them. As Europe gets a higher profile over the next few months, this poll confirms that the right course will also prove the most popular.

Editorial

2007-11-28T18:55:00.000Z

Blogging, which due to recent business in real life has been light of late, will now cease altogether until 9 December at the earliest as I am shortly to embark on a trip abroad.

Please leave comments if you wish as usual - I will publish them on my return.

Elliott

Donorgate

2007-11-28T16:11:00.000Z

Another week, another scandal. Even for our systematically malfeasant Labour government, however, this latest episode of criminal deceit is genuinely shocking.

It is shocking in its longevity. The illegally disguised donations from Labour businessman David Abrahams began as far back as 2003. And it is positively astounding that these payments continued even at the height of the parliamentary and police inquiries into the cash for honours affair (timeline from the Times).

Compare the current debacle with the political scandals of the 1990s. The cash for questions affair involved a few thousand pounds. Jonathan Aitken perjured himself and ruined his life over £1,000.

Here we are talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds being illegally diverted to bankroll the entire Labour party. The sheer monstrousness of this abuse makes the Major government, castigated for the chicanery of a handful of private individuals, look positively paragon.

Indeed, it is ironic that all this duplicity over funding comes as a result of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (2000), which was passed by Labour in one of their sanctimonious fits of mock anger at "Tory sleaze". (It was also supposed to starve the Tories of some of their funding, being used at the time of its passing to threaten Michael Ashcroft for example.)

The scandal has already claimed the political lives of a couple of anonymous minions. There may be one or two more to come. But the fallout will contaminate everyone, up to and including Gordon Brown.

Last week, the government scaled the pinnacle of fatuity; this week, the Labour party has reached the acme of corruption. All that remains is to see how long the fuse has left to burn before this bankrupt, trivial, ramshackle, shortsighted, inept, grubby, obstinate, incongruous, conceited, surreptitious, tired, lying, unworthy and unpleasant administration explodes into oblivion.

Datagate

2007-11-21T17:32:00.000Z

The scandal of the missing child benefit data rightly threatens to overwhelm our government. Three lessons about that government stand out.

1. Our government's instinct when confronted by failure is to dissemble and cover up. These records were put in the post over a month ago, and senior Revenue management were informed of their loss on 8 November. And yet it took twelve days for the public to be made aware that sensitive data concerning a huge swathe of the country - an estimated 25 million people - had gone AWOL!

2. When our government is incompetent it can be breathtakingly so. Where were the data protection controls? Was there a code of practice for sending out sensitive information? Was the deregulated postal contract an issue?

In its self-serving secrecy and its boggling ineptitude the British government has shown itself the peer of the Soviet authorities at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. Then, too, an arrogant and shambolic bureaucracy tried to conceal the fruits of its own dereliction. At least Gorbachev was shamed into pushing forward with perestroika as a result.

Which brings us to lesson number 3. Our government's relationship with us - the citizenry - is doomed. It is defined purely by hysteria and contempt. Our government is hysterical in the rigour with which it regulates us, arrogating huge responsibility for our affairs. It then proves itself contemptuous in the lack of trouble it takes over them.

The Data Protection Act has this week become a case in point. Strict rules are applied to our schools and colleges, our private businesses, even our churches, supposedly to prevent private information falling into the wrong hands. And then government itself loses millions of sensitive records in the post.

If there is a silver lining to this sorry episode, it is that more people will wake up to the dissembly and incompetence which big government entails. Then, perhaps, we can insist on something humbler in future.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

2007-11-18T16:47:00.000Z

Remember the story from a couple of weeks back about Prince Harry and the hen harriers?

Prince Harry is the victim of a "dirty tricks" campaign over the alleged killing of two birds of prey at Sandringham, his friends fear ... It is understood that only one of the alleged three witnesses - a member of staff from Natural England - gave a statement to the police and none of them wants to be identified.

This prompted Charles Moore to draw attention to the background of Natural England's Chairman, Sir Martin Doughty:

I note from Who’s Who that Sir Martin spent several years as Labour leader of Derbyshire County Council. Might one suggest that his organisation is more interested in politics than in birds?

Former Sheffield Polytechnic lecturer Sir Martin was first elected a Labour councillor in 1981. Is he really using his quango chairmanship - sorry, "chairship" - to prosecute the class war which doubtless fired his politics in the heyday of the loony left?

Further news in the Times today suggests he is.

One of Britain’s finest shooting estates is at the centre of a landmark criminal prosecution over claims that its millionaire owner has defiled the countryside.

Natural England, the government’s conservation agency, has issued criminal charges against the Wemmergill estate, a grouse moor that is a playground for royals and celebrities.

The estate is owned by Michael Cannon ... Cannon, who is worth £300m and is ranked 238th on The Sunday Times Rich List, describes the criminal charges as "a complete waste of public money" ... It is believed to be the first prosecution by Natural England in which a landowner is accused of damaging his own property.

Sir Martin Doughty, created Knight Bachelor in the 2001 Birthday Honours list, would not be the first former left-wing firebrand to be reduced to bringing down the system from within.

He might well be the first to do so with more than 2,300 staff and over £200m of taxpayers' money a year to help him, however, and that six-figure salary probably comes in useful too (Natural England annual report).

I wonder how many red flags you can buy for that?

Disappointing Appointments

2007-11-14T17:48:00.000Z

If a prime minister can't make decent appointments, what can he do?

Assuming that Gordon Brown is possessed of a modicum of self-awareness, this question must be echoing round his capacious head at the moment. His "government of all the talents" - a hubristic designation which always invited failure - is collapsing around him. If your own handpicked men let you down, it's time to consider making way for a steadier hand.

On the radio this morning, Brown's surprise appointee as Home Office security minister guilelessly explained that he was not "fully convinced" of the government's proposal to allow police to detain terror suspects for more than 28 days. Former First Sea Lord Alan West was then forced into a humiliating U-turn after a brusque summons to Number 10:

"My feeling is, yes, we need more than 28 days," he told reporters. "I personally absolutely believe that within the next two to three years, we will require more than that for one of these complex plots. So I am convinced that's the case, but it is very difficult because there is a civil liberties issue."

How disarmingly vague! Presumably he was a little confused after what must have been a warm endorsement of government policy by the man who invited him on board.

Last week, the Spectator reported that Brown is also ruing the appointment of Mark Malloch Brown (no relation) to the Foreign Office. A former UN apparatchik who made a fetish while in New York of antagonising the Americans, his selection looked odd from day one, but we know that Brown has a poor grasp of foreign affairs. By the Speccie's account, his understanding has since deepened:

Confidants of the Prime Minister now report that Brown claims that if he 'had known it would cause such a fuss, I wouldn’t have appointed [Malloch B]' ...

[Malloch B's] suggestion that Anglo–American relations would not be as close ... led to ... the Prime Minister snorting in private that 'Mr Malloch Brown does not speak for the government on relations with America' (anger having temporarily stripped Malloch Brown of his peerage, it seems).

In the Admiral's case, I've cited his views before and share his initial position on terror detention. As for Malloch Brown, the least said the better. What connects these personal prime ministerial appointments, however, is that they have caused severe headaches for Gordon Brown. They cast further doubt on his competence as a result.

With each passing week our prime minister looks increasingly out of his depth. Much longer, and he will have proved himself inadequate - as well as incongruous - in office.

Threat Of Iran Sanctions Is Empty Spin

2007-11-13T16:11:00.000Z

As Gordon Brown committed Britain to pursuing multilateral sanctions against Iran in his Mansion House speech last night, it is worth recalling why we won't be able to secure them and why they wouldn't work anyway. The threat of military action remains the only means whereby Ahmadinejad can be diverted from the pursuit of nuclear arms.

As I wrote back in February, when Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia and the US first sat down in London to discuss how to stop Iran enriching uranium (original, with links), agreeing UN sanctions would be

an unusually assertive step for the international community, so it's difficult to see it happening ... China has announced today that anything other than a negotiated settlement will not be countenanced, which appears to rule sanctions out. Russia has taken a similar line at the UN in the past. Both countries have commercial interests in Iran, as does Germany. British public opinion would be dead set against further aggression in the Middle East at a time when the government is languishing in the polls. So the US - which is divided on the subject of Iran itself - would find little support even for sanctions at this stage.

This analysis proved correct. The conference yielded a toothless UN resolution and the US has since imposed sanctions unilaterally.

But suppose such a resolution emerged, was approved by the UN security council and was put to Iran. All the signs are that Iran would fail to comply. So sanctions would begin. What a nightmare that would be! The Iraqi experience of the 1990s teaches us just how ineffective sanctions against a ruthless and wealthy country are. The late Saddam Hussein was never short of a gold toilet or two ten years ago, contriving the while to stuff the world's press with vivid propaganda on how UN sanctions were depriving Iraqi children of proper food and medical supplies. Predictably, there followed a howl of outrage directed against the sanctions programme. This culminated in the shameful corruption of the oil-for-food fiasco. The fatal combination of manipulability and unpopularity makes possible sanctions against Iran a truly dismal option.

Nothing has changed between then and now. Oh, except that after our appeasement of Iran during the hostage crisis, the credibility of any threat from Britain is zero - and the whole debacle gave the UN and EU an opportunity to prove their supineness in the face of Iranian aggression.

If the prime minster knows all this - which he should - his talk of "hardheaded internationalism" yesterday was merely so much headline-grabbing bluster. And British foreign policy is still dead.

Bottom Of The Class

2007-11-12T15:45:00.000Z

In recent news (BBC, Guardian, Mail), those "diplomas", which Ed Balls recently suggested might become the "qualification of choice" for British schoolchildren, have been slammed for being inferior to A-levels. In addition, the balance they strike between academic and vocational training is unclear and the timetable for introducing them is hopelessly rushed.

None of these reports, however, mentions that the Nuffield Review - the independent body from whose recent "Issues Paper" these criticisms are drawn - also addressed the question of why the government's latest schools wheeze is so flawed:

Politicians and civil servants have made a virtue of Diplomas being designed in a completely new way in order to signify the novelty of the initiative and its difference from earlier broad vocational qualifications.

In other words, the diplomas are a pointless innovation. The government wanted to be seen to be doing something; they are something.

The generic template for the Diplomas was primarily developed by private consultants working for QCA ... awarding bodies [exam boards], which had the expertise to contribute to the Diplomas, were only allowed to play a marginal role in the initial design, even though they were later charged with turning the content specifications into qualifications ...

Practitioners [teachers], who have considerable experience of both curriculum development and teaching vocational qualifications, were excluded almost entirely.

So an unnecessary new educational qualification is being foisted on the country out of thin air with no input either from those expected to teach it or those charged with administering it. If education weren't such a crucial policy area, this would be darkly funny.

As it is, these diplomas will further erode academic education in a system which is already badly failing. To take one recent example, a new survey revealed that British children are among the least knowledgeable and curious about the world of any children currently inhabiting it:

UK children aged 11 to 16 have the lowest international awareness among their age group in 10 countries, a British Council survey says. Ipsos Mori asked 4,170 with internet access about such things as language learning and international affairs. Those in Nigeria had the highest ranking, while the UK was last after the US and Czech Republic ...

According to the British Council, UK children were the least likely to try to understand current events. More than twice as many Brazilian (69%) and German children (61%) said they would, compared with 28% of the UK sample and 30% of the American.

(The next time some superior, sneering leftist lays into the Americans for their stunted, passport-lacking introversion, I shall point him or her towards this data. Perhaps it goes some way to explaining why our foreign policy is such a shambles.)

Here we are, anyway, about to take the sledgehammer to a system which is already broken, again. No wonder our politicians send their own kids private.

Editorial

2007-11-07T18:55:00.000Z

Just a quick post to say that I'm away for a wedding over the next few days so shall not be blogging.

This means I'll miss the opportunity to observe the coverage of the school shooting in Finland - will there be the same judgemental hand-wringing over Finnish gun laws, and culture in general, as there would be had the killings occurred in the United States?

I'll also miss the opportunity to see whether or not anyone cares that London's reinstated borough council tried to make itself useful today in the matter of the repugnantly long-lived Sir Ian Blair.

Either way, normal transmissions should be resumed by Monday at the latest.

Damp Squib

2007-11-06T14:03:00.000Z

Perhaps it was inevitable, after the noise and excitement of Bonfire Night, that the Queen's Speech today should have turned out to be such a damp squib. As the BBC's somewhat plaintive post mortem put it:

Probably the only big surprise in Gordon Brown's first legislative programme was the lack of big surprises.

There's still scope for a lively parliamentary session, with the EU "Reform Treaty" to be ratified and proposals on party funding to be made, but where was the big idea? Where was the vision for the country which we were promised after the prime minister wretchedly chickened out of calling an early general election? As the BBC's correspondent rather wistfully ended his account:

Many were looking to this statement as the opportunity for the prime minister to be more specific and end qualms over his vision ... it has raised the prospect that Mr Brown will not call a general election any time next year - that he will want one more big Queen's speech in which to set out a truly Brownite agenda for the future.

It should be clear by now that Brown's agenda-setting days are over. And even if he were to outline a bold new legislative programme in November 2008 there might not be time to pass most of it before he would have to call, and most probably lose, an election.

What a waste of Her Majesty's time that would be - again.

Sideshow Nigel

2007-11-06T10:19:00.000Z

The little furore over an unguarded reference to Enoch Powell by a prospective parliamentary candidate has already claimed him as victim and passed into memory. Sideshow that it was, it did provide some useful lessons.

Firstly - and perhaps most obviously - Nigel Hastilow's original column demonstrates the extent to which immigration has come into its own as a subject fit for open discussion:

The family seems resigned to the fact that nobody will do anything to help. They have more or less given up complaining about the way we roll out the red carpet for foreigners while leaving the locals to fend for themselves.

When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: "Enoch Powell was right".

This appeared in a major local newspaper, something which would have been unthinkable a few short years ago.

Secondly, there is still a great deal of sensitivity about the issue, but as it has been deracialised in the last few years (as the focus shifted to migrants from central Europe) the country at large has become much less afraid of it. A recent Guardian column illustrates this nicely. The author trots out a pious rant about Enoch Powell to use against the Conservative party while expressly acknowledging that their candidate said nothing racist. The accompanying comments are infinitely less restrained than they would have been until recently:

"To use Enoch Powell's name as an opportunity to hang the racist label around the necks of those on the right of centre is totally opportunist and out of order. Try thinking the problem through rather than sticking labels on it."

"Unchecked immigration is a serious issue for this country and voicing concerns over it should not be deemed racist."

"I do not agree with Hastilow ... and his comments on the July bombings were an outrageous slur on immigrants in general, but we should all be allowed to voice our opinions without left wing pillocks accusing every Conservative of racism."

Or, indeed, without being condemned for it by a Labour party trying to make cheap political capital out of hypocritical witch-hunts.

Which brings us on to lesson three: Labour no longer occupy the moral high ground on migration policy and it's become a potentially explosive issue for them as a result. As some senior Tories pointed out - while distancing themselves from Hastilow's remarks -

Gordon Brown was himself sailing close to playing the race card with his recent promise of "British jobs for British workers".

And if it's OK for us to talk about immigration again, that's bad news for a party which trails way behind in polling on what has become one of the most important issues of the day for British voters.

Of course, the prime minister will have something to say on the subject in his widely leaked Queen's Speech later today. But if I were him I'd really be trying to deflect the focus onto something else.

On The Social

2007-11-03T17:14:00.000Z

Fraser Nelson, writing in this week's Spectator, thinks he has discovered a bold new appetite among Conservatives to address the issue of welfare reform. The party has trodden lightly on this subject though it certainly has the measure of the problem. As Nelson notes:

When New Labour started, there were 5.7 million on out-of-work benefits. Now, the figure is 5.4 million - hardly any change ...

The proportion of those on out-of-work benefits, 15 per cent of the [working age] population, is even higher in the cities. In Birmingham, one in five is on benefits. In Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, the figure rises to one in four ...

In Britain ... one in five children lives in a household with no earned income.

On this and other measures, such as the rate of teenage pregnancy, we remain the sick man of Europe.

What makes the scale of our welfare trap so tragic is the misery which so often results for those caught up in it. Subsidised inactivity is a deeply unhealthy condition for people to be in, both physically and mentally. By the government's own reckoning, for example, the suicide rate among the long-term unemployed is 35 times higher than for the population at large.

As you might expect, keeping such large numbers of people so unhappy is a hugely expensive business. On the latest Treasury figures (table B11 here), £139bn will go on social security payments this year. Deduct the £75bn the Department of Work and Pensions estimates will be spent on pensions and other benefits to the over-60s, and we're left with a yearly bill of £64bn.

That's more than we spend on education, twice what we spend on defence and three times what we spend on law enforcement - and all this at a time when the economy is relatively healthy. Imagine what could happen to that number in a recession!

It was precisely the spectre of the monetarist recession of the early 1980s and the ERM recession of the early 1990s which denied previous Conservative governments the moral authority to address this situation. It would not have been acceptable to pursue policies which generated unemployment and then reduce the entitlements of those who had lost their jobs.

Today, the situation is reversed: we have low unemployment and a Labour government whose tenure has proved it either philosophically disinclined to end the cycle of deprivation or incompetent to do so. The time is now ripe for a reform-minded Conservative government to do the job.

As a further incentive, recent polling undertaken for the party's Social Justice Policy Group showed that the country is crying out for change (pp. 89-91 here). When asked whether "people should be entitled to a reasonable minimum level of benefit, even if they are unwilling to work", 71% disagreed. 87% thought that "lone parents and disabled people capable of working should be encouraged to do so". And 80% agreed that "it is reasonable to expect that disabled people and people with health conditions should work if they are able to do so".

Given that Britain's welfare trap is a misery-making national disgrace (which costs a fortune), our appetite for reform is unsurprising.

Labour's record gives no reason to hope they might be able to deliver. The Spectator may well be onto something when it asserts that "only the Conservatives have the strength, energy and ideas to make poverty history in Britain."

Writing On The Wall

2007-11-01T13:22:00.000Z

As the Telegraph reports today, that great Charlie Lord Falconer is preparing to take the government to court over what he sees as an unfairly diminished pension entitlement.

Both Falconer and his predecessor in office - he of the wallpaper - have displayed an unbefitting venality which almost makes the abolition of the Lord Chancellorship easier to swallow. Perhaps this was the plan all along.

Either way, continued skirmishing over this matter will serve only to bring the government into further disrepute and damage Labour's standing in the country. That neither he nor the prime minister apparently think this more important than the issue of one man's pension arrangements shows how detached from reality their government has become.

The echoes of the Major years are ringing ever more clearly. At this rate it seems certain that the next prime minister of this country will be David Cameron.

Shambles Over Migration Figures

2007-10-31T16:55:00.000Z

As reports continue to make it clear that the British government has no idea how many foreign-born workers there are in the country, it is worth reflecting why.

800,000 ... 1.1 million ... now 1.5 million. Where do these figures come from? Which of them is reliable?

The row followed a claim by Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain that 2.7million jobs had been created under Labour, of which only 800,000 had gone to people from overseas.

Challenged by former Labour Minister Frank Field, however, Mr Hain revised the figure to 1,100,000. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said later that this still meant the majority of new jobs had gone to Britons ...

And yet another official figure, this time from the Government's own Office for National Statistics, put the total of migrant workers at 1.5million.

So the Department of Work and Pensions, the Home Office and the ONS all deployed conflicting data to address an issue around which the Conservative party built an election campaign as far back as 2001. Why are we in such a muddle over migration six years and two parliaments later?

Rewind to May, when underestimates of immigration levels were already threatening to undermine local authority efforts to plan for them. At the time, it had already been reported that the Office for National Statistics was being downsized, relocated and generally buggered about with so that Gordon Brown could meet the targets for reductions in the civil service on which his budgetary estimates depended.

Without proper ONS data, it is quite impossible to plan for proper government. Things are so bad that the Bank of England has even voiced concern that the country's economic statistics could become unreliable!

Even the opposition is helpless. Though Cameron's speech on the subject was welcome - and boy was it timely! - some of the more intelligent critics made the point that it relied on 2005 estimates of migrant numbers.

That's because, as you will note if you visit the ONS web site, no data for calendar 2006 is yet available.

We know that migration is a hugely important subject for our little and chaotic island, but so long as the chaos extends to our national statistics we won't be able to diagnose the problem adequately, never mind advance to a cure. What's next? Unreliable GDP estimates? A run on the pound?

Brown and Labour thought it was an easy victory to run down the ONS, but as the current shambles demonstrates, it's better to have the measure of a failure than fail even to be able to measure it.

Cameron On Migration

2007-10-29T17:08:00.000Z

As the Telegraph reports:

David Cameron today promised that immigration to Britain would be "substantially" lower under a Conservative government.

Good! How?

Mr Cameron confirmed plans to establish a Border Police Force with powers to track down and remove illegal migrants and to impose "transitional controls" on the entry of citizens from any new European Union members.

Hmm ... Bit of a shaky start. As the Tories have already acknowledged in their policy document on crime, the police are tied up chasing performance standards and tackling paperwork. The party doesn't need a new police force: it should merely reiterate its commitment to liberate the existing one. There are laws against working illegally. Let's enforce them.

As to the EU, it's a write off: citizens of EU countries have the right to reside in any member state. All governments have been able to do so far is to restrict them from being able to work legally for a specified period of time. Anyway, it's an irrelevance. Despite ignorant criticism from both parties of the left suggesting otherwise, the most recently available ONS figures show that just under 25% of net immigration originates from the EU (46,000 out of 185,000 for 2005).

What follows is better - brilliant even:

He also outlined new controls on married partners hoping to follow their spouses into Britain, promising only those aged 21 and over would be granted entry.

In addition spouses would also have to demonstrate that they are able to speak English.

Under a Tory government, he said, a new advisory body would suggest annual targets for economic immigration from non-EU nationals.

All good stuff, though we also need to reduce the number of student visas granted, reform the asylum system and start keeping track of all those entering and leaving the country.

Mr Cameron might not have quite covered all these things. His speech today seems nevertheless to have been a step in the right direction, and a giant leap ahead of the rest of the political field.

The New Samaritan

2007-10-26T15:15:00.000Z

As reported by the BBC:

A man who urinated on a woman as she lay dying ... has been sentenced to three years in prison. Anthony Anderson also covered Christine Lakinski with shaving foam after she collapsed in a Hartlepool street.

In the traditional version of this story, the baddies did no more than "pass by on the other side".

How lucky we are to live in a progressive, modern culture which can go so much further than this! As the report also mentioned:

A crowd had gathered around, watching and laughing, and the incident was filmed on a mobile phone.

So the episode was recorded for posterity! Why? So that it might serve as an example to others: "Go, and do thou likewise"?

For shame ...

Eleven Percent

2007-10-25T15:48:00.000Z

The Government says there is no scientific evidence to support lowering the 24-week legal limit for abortions.

Dawn Primarolo, the health minister ... told MPs: "The Department of Health's view and the advice to me is that - and that's why there is no proposals from the Government to amend the act - that the act works as intended and doesn't require further amendment at the present time."

The viability of babies born at 21 weeks was zero, at 22 weeks 1 per cent and 23 weeks 11 per cent, she said.

Oh really? As reported by the Times earlier this month:

Many centres of excellence, including those from the US, Sweden and Australia, have published data showing survival figures of 30%-60% at 23 weeks and 40%-70% at 24 weeks.

So why the discrepancy?

Professor Neil Marlow, president of the British Association of Perinatal Medicine (BAPM) ... said it is accepted practice in British neonatal units not to provide intensive care to babies born below 24 weeks.

So Primarolo was parroting something which could be seen as true only in a narrow, parochial sense. In actual fact it was a misrepresentation of the medical evidence on premature infant viability. There has been an improvement in viability since 1990 - when Britain last revisited the upper term limit for social abortion - which suggests a further downward revision would reflect scientific reality.

There is another eleven percent which stands up to scrutiny rather better. On Department of Health statistics, only eleven percent of abortions were carried out at over 13 weeks' gestation (never mind 20). Reducing the term limit, therefore, would not remotely dent a woman's right to choose.

Who would want the limit reduced though? Well, according to the latest polling, most of us do: 72% of women and a smaller but still significant majority of men.

Reducing the length of time a woman has to decide to end her pregnancy for social reasons is only one element of the Great British Abortion Debate now raging. But the case is clear cut: the science suggests it would be proper to do so, it would not entail a diminution of a woman's freedom of choice and most people want it to happen.

So will our MPs bring British policy into line with public opinion and modern medical reality? Or are they out of touch - and out of date?

Equality Act Claims Child's Life

2007-10-24T13:18:00.000Z

An 11-year-old boy is to be taken away from his Christian foster parents after two years and put into institutional local authority care because they have refused to teach him about homosexual relationships. As the Standard reports:

Vincent and Pauline Matherick ... became foster parents in 2001 and have since cared for 28 children at their home in Chard, Somerset.

Earlier this year, Somerset County Council's social services department asked them to sign a contract to implement Labour's new Sexual Orientation Regulations, part of the Equality Act 2006 ... Officials told the couple that under the regulations they would be required to discuss same-sex relationships with children as young as 11 and tell them that gay partnerships were just as acceptable as heterosexual marriages ... When the Mathericks objected, they were told they would be taken off the register of foster parents ...

Mrs Matherick, 61, said they had asked if they could continue looking after their foster son until he is found a permanent home, but officials refused and he will be placed in a council hostel on Friday.

It is disgusting, though not entirely shocking, that a child's future should be jeopardised for the sake of observing egalitarian pieties. For the sad fact is that this decision could destroy the boy's life.

As readers of this blog will already know, our care system is in chaos. The consequences of putting children into care are dire. And all of this lies hidden in shadow: recent responses to parliamentary questions on the subject show that the government doesn't really have much idea what's going on.

The care system has already been abused by local authorities in the name of meeting targets on adoption. Now it appears it is to be undermined further by the same authorities in the name of equality.

Thank God the little Hitlers on the local council don't have the power to take our own children into care on the same grounds. Yet.

Time For Some Good News

2007-10-23T14:57:00.000Z

A report published last week suggested that a 20mph speed limit in towns could help halve the number of deaths on Britain's roads by 2010. This may well be true, but it was a throw-away line in the BBC's report that really caught my eye:

In the UK there are currently around 3,200 road deaths annually, compared with more than 7,000 a year in the 1960s.

Given the dramatic rise in car ownership over that period, that's an impressive record. As the report went on to note:

This improvement is due to a number of factors, including seatbelts, improved car design, the breathalyser and traffic-calming measures.

An obvious question arose at this point, which the report didn't address. How well does our record compare with that of other countries?

Part of the answer is available in a huge EU survey published this year called the Panorama Of Transport - a classic bit of Brussels English! The European data (on p. 131) shows that Britain has many fewer road deaths each year than other large European countries: France, Germany and Italy have roughly 5,300-5,400, about 2,000 more than we do. When you measure the number of deaths per billion passenger kilometres travelled by road, the UK comes second out of the 25 EU countries with 5 fatalities (about half the EU average).

Indeed, a separate report was commissioned to look at the top three countries to see exactly what it was we were doing right. The study covered Sweden, the UK and the Netherlands, which allowed them to call it SUNFlower. The fatality rate per billion vehicle kilometres for 2000 actually puts Britain at the top of the table with 7.3, an outstanding performance relative not only to EU countries but also Australia, America and Japan.

In other words, Britain already enjoys one of the best road fatality records in the world (on a variety of measures).

This is good news indeed, and while there might be scope for us to make our roads even safer, it is odd that none of the coverage of the proposed new speed limit mentioned it. Indeed, the only source I could find which invoked international comparisons was the Independent. Under a sub-heading called "What's The UK's Record On Road Safety?" the paper had the following to say:

The UK has managed to tackle road safety quite effectively over the past 20 years compared with some of our European neighbours, with the number of road deaths halving compared with 40 years ago. But 3,200 people still die on British roads each year ...

Some European nations are outperforming the UK in reducing road deaths. Sweden, the example which many road safety experts say the country should follow, has just 49 fatalities a year per million people, compared with 56 deaths per million in the UK.

This is a strange interpretation of the data to say the least. It looks as if the paper, or its source, was deliberately trying to make out that the UK compares less favourably with other countries on this front than is actually the case.

Why would someone want to do this? Or is it just that there are some who can't believe that, as well as learning from our neighbours abroad, we might also have something to teach them from time to time?

Liberal Democrats Of The Summer Wine

2007-10-22T14:35:00.000Z

Bad news for those of us who would like to see a referendum on the EU "Reform Treaty". Like any parliamentary ratification, securing a plebiscite would depend on the votes of those lovable old scoundrels in the Liberal Democratic party.

The late, lamented Foggy refused one, and now his likely successors, Clegg and Compo, have said they don't want one either. (Clegg is the younger of the two, and Compo is best known for "chasing the dragon", a.k.a. Nora Batty, as a young man.)

Both Labour and the Lib Dems promised a referendum on the EU Constitution. The "Reform Treaty" is almost identical. Even if they can't keep their own manifesto promises, we might at least have hoped that Compo and Clegg, as potential leaders of an opposition party, could have helped hold the government to account over breaking one of theirs.

It would appear not. The antics of Foggy and the rest have kept us all rippingly entertained over the years, but they appear to have outlived whatever usefulness they might have had. May the time soon come for them to succumb to their dismal polling and leave the national stage at last.

Ratification

2007-10-18T16:08:00.000Z

If there were a Labour party rebellion against the bill to ratify the EU "reform treaty" - assuming the nation is not offered a referendum - how significant might it be?

One authoritative study is dismissive, suggesting that no more than 40 Labour MPs would vote against the government, while reports over the summer put the number north of 100. Even at the bottom end of this range, however, the government's working majority of 69 would be easily overturned.

The success of the bill would accordingly depend on the other parties. Most Conservatives would no doubt oppose it. So unless the Labour rebels really were to number more than 100 the Liberal Democrats would hold the fate of the treaty in the balance.

Would they rein in their Europhilia for the sake of embarrassing the government (as Paddy Ashdown so memorably did during the ratification of Maastricht in 1993)? After all, though Ming ruled it out before his then party's conference, most Lib Dem voters want a referendum on the "reform treaty". Would they really be happy seeing it simply nodded through by their MPs?

Or would they shirk the responsibility of thwarting the EU's latest power grab and trudge dutifully through the lobby behind Smiler Brown?

How desperate the pitch of our politics has become once more! Who would have thought we had again reached the point where the Liberal Democrats would matter?

Rumble Of Discontent

2007-10-17T15:22:00.000Z

David Miliband testified to the European Scrutiny Committee yesterday, and was displeased to have his government's stance on the so-called EU Reform Treaty compared to that of Neville Chamberlain at Munich. As the Telegraph put it:

The Foreign Secretary, who is the son of Jewish immigrants, reacted with horror when Michael Connarty, who chairs the European Scrutiny Committee, said listening to Mr Miliband explain there was no threat to British sovereignty from the reform treaty reminded him of Chamberlain's "peace in our time" declaration shortly before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.

One detail which has been reported without comment is that Connarty is a Labour MP.

There has been little acknowledgement that Labour are split on the issue of an "EU Referendum", and still less consideration of what a threat this is to the "next phase" of Brown's premiership. He is bound to sign the treaty in Lisbon, but after that it will need to be ratified, either by referendum (if he allows one) or by parliament. As I wrote the other day, the latter course is not looking like such a soft option - which the news of Mr Connarty's intervention confirms.

In its own coverage, the Guardian described the Scrutiny Committee as "the government's chief tormentor" over the treaty. Perhaps for now - later, that distinction will surely belong to Labour's back benches.

More On Puritans

2007-10-16T15:43:00.000Z

They're back! As the Times reported this morning, the campaign to ban drinking is back in full swing:

Drinkers in middle-class areas are more likely routinely to consume "hazardous" amounts of alcohol than those in poorer areas, research published today shows ... The figures will be used by the Government to target middle-class wine drinkers and to make drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking.

This is exactly the same story which cropped up four months ago, targeted at exactly the same people in exactly the same terms (the phrase used by "a Whitehall source" back in June was "Ministers want drunkenness in public to be as socially unacceptable in ten years' time as smoking or drink-driving is today.")

In another news echo, the article reminds us that

All alcoholic drinks sold in bottles and cans are expected to carry labels disclosing the number of units and recommended safe drinking limits by the end of next year. Doctors' leaders are also calling for pubs and restaurants to display warnings stating how many units of alcohol are contained in drinks served by the glass.

Lest we forget what is at stake, the BBC carried a story today describing how it was slapped down by the health fascists for broadcasting footage of people smoking pipes on "Top Gear".

"Smoking in a studio is illegal. We would hope programme-makers make some form of apology," said a spokeswoman for Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).

Never mind that people in the audience didn't mind, or that the Beeb received only two complaints from viewers. As the "Ash" woman went on to say:

producers "should be reminded at the very least of the law, and make sure they abide by it".

Once it is sacrificed, a freedom is difficult to regain. Once a poisonous group of anonymous lobbyists has secured its little law, it doesn't matter whether or not people want it enforced (or wanted it in the first place): you're stuck with it, and if you break it, they'll be out to get you.

So will it be with drink. Today, we are given a second warning that the health fascists have another of our freedoms in their sights. If only someone in office or in parliament would stand up to them.

As a postscript, one of the ugliest aspects of these campaigns is the involvement of health workers. An NHS which has grown fat on taxpayer billions, and where patients are treated like and left to die in dirt, should not presume to lecture us on our choices from a moral high ground it does not occupy. But that is another story.

Conspiracy!!!!

2007-10-15T15:39:00.000Z

While the Diana inquest bores on - and we still don't know who shot JFK - there is one conspiracy theory sufficiently seductive to have engaged the sponsorship of one of our Members of Parliament. As the Standard reported today:

Fresh doubts were raised over the suicide of Dr David Kelly after it emerged that no fingerprints were found on the knife he supposedly used to kill himself.

The Hutton Inquiry into the death of the Ministry of Defence weapons expert ruled that he slashed one of his wrists with a blunt garden knife and took an overdose of pills. But the campaigning Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker has carried out his own investigation after forensic experts questioned the official version of events ...

The lack of fingerprints is especially strange as police records also revealed the germ warfare expert was not wearing any gloves when he died – nor were any found at the scene of his death ...

Mr Baker is also suspicious about the cut to Dr Kelly's wrist. It completely severed a tiny blood vessel called the ulnar artery ... Mr Baker asked the Office of National Statistics how many people in the UK died in 2003 from a cut to the ulnar artery. He was told that Dr Kelly was the only one.

The Hutton enquiry, of course, also specifically concluded that there was no evidence of the involvement of any third party in Dr Kelly's death. That's what makes conspiracy theories such as this so thrilling! The complete lack of evidence of murder means the killers must have belonged to some secret government-sponsored elite liquidation squad (no doubt reporting in to MI5 on an unofficial, arm's length basis).

The fact that said elite squad has allowed Norman Baker, MP, to go around airing his concerns in this matter should, perhaps, lead him to question his theory. After all, if the Men in Black were willing to erase Dr Kelly - possibly the most newsworthy man in Britain at the time - an obscure Liberal Democrat MP must seem like small beer in comparison. And they would have had all the time in the world to make their nefarious preparations: Baker spoke to the BBC about his theory back in February.

Oughtn't our MPs to have something better to do than spend time in the paranoid pursuit of the bogey man? Has Norman Baker once stopped to consider the distress his antics must cause to Dr Kelly's family and friends?

The Liberal Democrats should be ashamed of him. Though on the plus side I suppose it does prevent his getting involved in a real conspiracy - the ongoing non-campaign to unseat the leader of their party ...

A Gathering Storm

2007-10-14T14:47:00.000Z

Talk about kicking a man while he's down - and this has nothing to do with the rugby. The Blairites have been twisting the knife after a fortnight which has brought the prime minister's brief honeymoon period to an end. Lord Falconer, possibly motivated by a spat over his pension entitlement, a clutch of other ex-ministers and even Cherie have been agitating against Gordon Brown this weekend at a time which sees the Conservatives pulling ahead to a solid poll lead over the government.

So much for the theory that the Blair-Brown show could have been cynically staged as a tool for managing media coverage of UK politics.

There is an obvious echo of the Major years here - with the difference that Sir John obviously managed to win an election of his own before presiding over the Conservative party's spectacular self-detonation. It is one of the similarities which ought to be exercising the current prime minister, however. If I were Brown I would be treading rather more carefully on Europe than he seems to be at present.

The Lisbon treaty - a flagrant rehash of the old Giscard Constitution - could well turn out to be Labour's Maastricht. As Major once believed that his opt-outs and little victory on subsidiarity would make that treay easier for sceptics to swallow, Brown has put his faith in those famous "red lines". He still refuses to contemplate a referendum.

The Labour party is already dangerously split on the referendum issue. This weekend's interventions by Blairites demonstrate just how much is at stake if Brown ignores the warning signals. Labour's unity, discipline and medium-term survival - its very cohesion as a party - could be gone in months, just as the Conservative party found in the 90s.

The best course of action the prime minister could follow would be to renege on his commitment not to hold a referendum. He could claim he had "listened to the British people", avoid a potentially fatal party crisis, weather the political fallout (as he's having to do at the moment) and wait for the electorate to forget the whole thing.

There is one problem. The Conservatives recently committed to a referendum on this and all subsequent EU treaties. They could make huge short-term capital out of the U-turn and fact that Brown had stolen another Tory policy. Would he really be willing to suffer the humiliation he would receive at their hands for the sake of doing the politically more sensible thing?

He will if he's as smart as he thinks he is. The alternative is following John Major's example: splitting his party and handing an opposition which already scents blood the keys to Downing Street.

Muslim Scholars Call For Peace

2007-10-11T14:50:00.000Z

From our Jordanian sister blog, Ali-Yar Yusuf:

Today's open letter to leaders of Christian churches could not have come too soon. Calling for respect, kindness, justice and love between the Christian and Muslim peoples of the world, the 138 Islamic scholars who signed it have shown great courage in speaking out against a militant Christianity which has had its way for too long.

Ever since 9/11, when four men flew passenger jets into Dubai's world-famous Burj Al Arab hotel, the threat posed by Christian extremism has weighed on the minds of many in the east. Of course, the extremists are in a minority - most Christians want peace - and although it can never be used to justify the appalling loss of life that day, many impartial observers would agree that there were glaring shortcomings in the hotel's butler service. Followed as it was by the Riyadh bombing in 2004, however, which changed the course of Saudi Arabia's general election, and the Tehran metro bombing the following year, this knowledge has done nothing to lessen eastern anxiety.

The wider cultural defensiveness of Christians is almost as worrying as the bombings. It was only two years ago that a Syrian newspaper published a cartoon depicting the Christian god, Jesus, with a stick of dynamite in his beard. In the furore which followed, the Syrian embassies in Norway and Denmark were sacked and the Syrian and Egyptian flags were burned in Christian cities from Seattle to St Petersburg. There were over 100 deaths, including the murder of a blameless imam.

Some Christian countries entrench such intolerant attitudes in their very legal systems. In Britain, for example, a rapist can expect to be kept for up to five or six years in prison, with only a TV set, a few video games, a smattering of pornography and perhaps a few drugs to keep him happy. How barbaric and inhumane this seems compared to a quick, bracing stoning (of the victim)! Surely it is time for the Christian world to get its house in order.

What compounds the issue for many people is the conduct - and sometimes the special treatment - of Christian minority populations in eastern countries. Take the adoption of extreme forms of Christian dress, such as shorts and tube tops. Some Christian women argue that the Bible ordains such attire and that they are merely following the traditions of their faith. Others contend that their refusal to cover themselves in giant sheets is a political statement which deliberately isolates them from the wider community.

The tendency for some areas of government, especially local authorities, to water down eastern culture for fear of offending these minorities is particularly vexatious. We all remember the time when Damascus City Council decided that Eid should be formally designated "Fastival" - indeed, newspapers are filled with such tales every Ramadan. It is only right and proper that such pandering, which causes genuine offence to Muslims in their own countries, should stop.

With Christians so disunited and factious, the way forward will be difficult, and some of their leaders are downright crazy. (It is well known, for instance, that George Bush, the colourful and controversial President of the United States, believes himself to be the Seventh Angel of the Apocalypse whose coming will signal the end of the world. Should we really allow such a man - who also opined that "Luxembourg must be wiped off the map" - to have access to nuclear weapons?)

Though the road may be hard, however, we must try: there is too much at stake for us to continue to ignore the problem in the name of "tolerance". Well done, those 138 scholars! You have shown us the way. All of us should now join you in calling a halt to Christian terror, aggression, barbarism and special pleading.

FA For The FO

2007-10-10T15:49:00.000Z

The press have gone to town on Mr Darling for copying the Tories' homework. The Leader of the Opposition has demolished Mr Brown at the dispatch box. The felon and the phoney. You could almost feel sorry for them.

Nevertheless, one of the more egregious exaggerations and embellishments of the former's budget speech deserves further critical attention. Said Mr Darling yesterday:

Matching our commitment to international security [q.v.] with international diplomacy, we will increase the Foreign Office budget, including spending £460 million in 2010 on the British Council, the BBC World Service, and the launch of BBC Farsi and Arabic TV channels.

Really? Annex D9 of the Pre-Budget Report / Comprehensive Spending Review - which comprises some explanatory spiel about the FCO budget - mentioned

an ambitious value for money reform programme, generating net cash-releasing savings of £144 million ... a rationalisation of the overseas diplomatic network ... increased co-location with DFID, realising net cash-releasing savings ... rationalisation of the overseas estate, enabling the disposal of £140 million of assets.

Hardly a picture of budgetary largesse. Indeed, Table B13 of the full PBR / CSR shows the combined current and capital budgets for the Foreign Office frozen at £1.8bn for the three years from 2008-09 to 2010-11 - a decrease of £0.1bn from 2007-08.

Clearly, when he said that this was "matching our commitment to international security", Darling was using the opposite of dramatic irony: only he, and not his audience, was in on the joke.

Don't get me wrong. This government's seeming desire to alienate the Americans and enrage the Russians at the same time - while appeasing Iran on the side for good measure - puts its foreign policy about level with that of the Duke of Buckingham.

That said, the FCO is one of the key offices of state. Our international diplomatic, cultural and intelligence networks are getting more important, not less. That Labour is tightening the purse strings at this uncertain time in our history speaks volumes about its wrongheaded priorities for government.

Pre-Budget Report: Defence Spending Still Cut!

2007-10-09T17:31:00.000Z

Readers may recall that back in March I described how Gordon Brown's last budget entailed freezing defence spending into 2007-08. In real terms, this represented a cut of over £800m. What was announced was an "additional £400m" for defence.

Well, the "additional £400m" is back! Brown's successor had the following to say this afternoon in his Pre-Budget Report speech:

The whole House will want to join me in acknowledging the dedication and courage of our armed forces in action overseas, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To support our armed forces in all they do, I am today allocating an additional £400 million for operations this year.

Amazingly, this doesn't quite represent the announcement of the same £400m a second time - at least, not on the surface. The "unallocated special reserve" of £400m for defence which Brown announced in March has indeed increased to £800m. As before, however, to see what's really going on you have to add this reserve to the current and capital budgets, which amounts to total budgeted expenditure on defence.

Comparing this added-up data from table 13 in Chapter C of the Budget to the same data from table 13 in Annex B of today's Pre-Budget Report / Comprehensive Spending Review gives the following picture:

*Total UK Defence Spending, £bn*
Year	Budget	PBR / CSR
2006-07	40.8 (est)	40.6 (act)
2007-08	40.8	41.1
2008-09	-	41.5
2009-10	-	43.4
2010-11	-	45.6

It is quite possible that actual out turn for 2006-07 has been manipulated lower to exaggerate the year-on-year increase. (A project could have been delayed into this fiscal year to turn an increase from £40.8bn to £40.9bn into one from £40.6bn to £41.1bn.) Even if we ignore that possibility, the fact remains that spending is still due to fall in real terms.

The Treasury's own estimate for CPI in 2007-08 (also in Annex B) is 2.25%. To keep pace with inflation, therefore, spending on defence this year would have had to increase by £913.5m (2.25% x £40.6bn). In fact, the budgeted increase is £500m.

Rather neatly, then, Alistair Darling has announced a cut in defence spending in real terms of over £400m, while making it seem as if he is increasing it by exactly that amount. (One word which springs to mind is "chutzpah".) How history repeats itself under this government!

It is also worth noting the year-on-year percentage increases now budgeted for while we're on the subject. Using the PBR / CSR data from the table above gives the following results:

*Total UK Defence Spending, % increase on previous year*
Year	Increase
2007-08	1.2%
2008-09	1.0%
2009-10	4.6%
2010-11	5.1%

What budgetary increase there is, in other words, is suspiciously back-loaded. An army may well march on its stomach, but you can't pay for one with "jam tomorrow". And the budget for 2010-11 is one over which the current administration may well have no control in any case.

So another disgraceful squeezing of the nation's defence budget by one of the more belligerent governments in our history. It is saddening, if not surprising exactly, to see this sleight-of-hand offered in place of proper resourcing of Britain's fighting men and women.

Spun Dry

2007-10-08T13:54:00.000Z

Gordon Brown's humiliating climbdown over an early general election on Saturday is still reverberating round the British media - despite Labour's best efforts.

Yesterday's cynical attempt to reignite the Conservative row over grammar schools by making it easier for parents to vote to abolish them has failed. The story was picked up in a peremptory fashion by the Mail today but has essentially sunk without trace.

At the same time, the "young Turks" suspected of infecting the country with election fever are scrambling to avoid being impaled. As the Guardian reported today:

Douglas Alexander, who is taking much of the blame for the fiasco, had turned against an election in the past week ... Allies of Ed Miliband, the Cabinet Office minister and a close aide of Mr Brown, also insisted he had not been pressing an election ... Ed Balls, another member of the Brown inner circle, also shifted against a poll ...

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is the most senior government minister to still admit that she had backed an election. One older senior Labour long term opponent of an election commented: "Success has a thousand friends. Failure is an orphan."

The denials ring hollow. The distractions don't work. Our focus remains on the muddled shambles which has turned the clunking fist into the model of his compatriot's "sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie". For now, the mighty spin machine which has been the substance - the soul - of Labour's success has toppled over.

No doubt, in time, the nation's memory of these wretched manoeuvrings will fade, and the government's spinners and whisperers will have returned to work. In the meantime, Brown is spun dry, and it is difficult to see how his announcement on troops today or the pre-budget report tomorrow will help.

Science Museum Gets Religion

2007-10-06T14:46:00.000Z

The Standard told us yesterday that the global boiling circus will soon have a big tent open at London's famous Science Museum.

The new director of the Science Museum has revealed plans for a £6 million climate change exhibition. Professor Chris Rapley will mastermind the show, which aims to deliver real evidence on how climate change is affecting the Earth ...

He said: "We want to deliver the evidence for climate change, but show people exactly how scientists came to these conclusions. We are very keen to show how we know that climate change is real and that it is driven by humans. But we will not be making any judgments on policies, the whole exhibit will be about letting people come to their own conclusions."

A likely story! The climate change section of the Museum's website contains a game called "Battle For The Planet". It opens in 2100 when "climate change has brought the Earth to its knees" and "life is far from pleasant". You are invited to go back in time to 2007 and make lifestyle choices which will save the planet.

All the usual nostrums about air travel and energy conservation are regurgitated (though it did come as a surprise that the game recommends using a single basin of water to wash in every day rather than having a shower). After you have made your choices, you are given a "carbon score", told how much damage you have done to the world and informed that "the average person in the UK emits 55 times as much carbon dioxide as someone in Bangladesh." As well as being ungrammatical, there is no effort to explain what this means or why it might be significant.

Needless to say, nowhere on the website of this museum of science do we find anything about iron fertilization, or much about the anthropogenic argument and its rivals. And some of it is just plain bonkers, as for instance when the prediction is made that by 2050 in Britain, "Weather damage costs the insurance industry hundreds of billions of pounds a year." The cost to the insurance industry from this summer's flooding was estimated at around £3bn. Either the Museum knows something about inflation over the next 43 years the rest of us don't, or it's peddling unfounded, hysterical, unscientific garbage.

So what are the chances that the Museum's multi-million-pound exhibit will end up simply brainwashing children with more mushy, preachy pap?

Given that its new director is C. Rapley, they're pretty good. From his Guardian profile we learn that in his role as head of the British Antarctic survey he colluded with Al Gore to produce one of his "Live Earth" concerts. He also wrote a pitiful column for the BBC in 2006 in which he revealed himself to be a believer in population doom. In other words, he's a textbook enviro-loony likely to give over a Victorian monument to progress and human achievement to a religious cult devoted to unachievable regression.

According to the history section of the Science Museum website, it started life in a building made of iron which was so ugly and functional looking it earned the nickname, "the Brompton Boilers". What is going on inside the Museum today is itself rather ugly. "The Brompton Bollocks", perhaps?

Political Correctness Makes Prisoners Of Us All

2007-10-04T14:32:00.000Z

The Telegraph carried a story today entitled, "Firemen Reprimanded For Disturbing Gay Sex Act":

Four firemen who disturbed an outdoor gay sex session have been reprimanded and heavily fined after they were accused by one of the participants of being homophobic. The firemen shone their torches from their engine into bushes on the Downs - an area of parkland in Bristol said to be popular with people engaging in late-night outdoor sex known as "dogging" - interrupting the four as they were involved in a gay sex act.

Spiteful, perhaps - we don't know - but the overreaction which followed beggars belief:

Two of [the firemen] have now been fined up to £1,000; one has been demoted in rank and the other given a written warning. Each of them has also been ordered to attend a two-day equality course ... The four-man crew have also been transferred to other stations.

Bear in mind that the men having sex in public were breaking the law. (Not surprisingly, the man who complained did so to a medical charity and requested that the affair not be reported to the police.) The firemen, however boorish their behaviour, did nothing wrong - short, perhaps, of using torches designed for locating cats stuck up trees for disturbing men stuck in bushes. And for this they suffer fines, demotion and relocation!

Perhaps the most absurd penalty is their having to attend the grim-sounding "equality course" for two days. Remember that these men are firefighters - on the night concerned they had been answering 999 calls until half past ten. A sane society might presume that they had better things to do than listen to a course with the wince-making title, "'Lesbians, Gays, Bi-sexuals and Transgender Equality in the Fire Service - an absolute taboo?"

Kevin Pearson, Chief Fire Officer with Avon Fire and Rescue Service, said any allegation of racism or homophobia was taken seriously ... He said the crew was found to be in breach of internal policies.

Ah, of course! Nothing to do with the misuse of equipment or the intrusion per se, but no manager wants to face a witch-hunt carried out by professional grievance-mongers on behalf of a revered minority group.

What good comes of cases like this? What rights are being upheld? The truth is that "racism" and "homophobia" have become paranoid democracy's equivalents of paranoid tyranny's "subversion" and "espionage". Dictators the world over have used such allegations to cage their peoples in prisons of fear, long after the letter of the charges ceased to bear any relation to reality. Today, in Britain, it goes the same with us.

It does not matter to these firemen, and nor should it matter to you and me, that it was a medical charity and not a paid informant who denounced them to the authorities. It does not matter that it was a public sector manager and not a secret policeman who meted out their sentence. This is mere semantics. The fact is that there is a mechanism at work in our country which operates outside the established law and has the power to harm those whom it takes for enemies.

While we may not be able to fathom the mechanism, we know that it exists, and we would be bold indeed were this not to make us uneasy. Like these firemen, we must go about our daily routine with a watchful fear lest we make an unspecified mis-step.

This is not freedom. As another prisoner once wrote:

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.

Election Fever!

2007-10-03T10:27:00.000Z

Though the disease has yet to be formally diagnosed, some believe the symptoms speak for themselves. The Guardian, for instance, under the dramatic headline "November 1: The Countdown Begins", opined that

Gordon Brown yesterday set the stage to announce a November 1 general election on Tuesday next week ... The Iraq trip is part of a carefully crafted timetable that will culminate in two successive Commons statements at the beginning of next week on domestic spending and Iraq that may clear the way for the announcement of a November poll.

Perhaps, and this speculation is doubtless well-informed by gossip. But Brown would be a fool to do it.

The main reason is that all the actual polls which have been conducted this year suggest he would lose his majority. May's batch of council elections, a clutch of local council by elections and - contrary to the government's all too readily swallowed spin - two parliamentary by elections in late July all pointed to a fatally weak performance by Labour. (Remember that Labour's share of the vote only has to fall by 3-4% for them to lose their majority.)

Another reason, which compounds the problem presented by the electoral arithmetic, is that turnout could be abysmal. On Thursday 1 November, the sun will set at half past four having risen just before polls would open. The mean high temperature in November ranges across the country from 4-11 deg C. And just imagine trying to run a poll if we should get another couple of weeks of heavy rain and more flooding in the Midlands.

Though a difficult subject, conventional wisdom is that a low turnout would be bad for the government. Given the parlous turnout in our previous two general elections, a further erosion would be severely embarrassing. And it is unarguable that victory on such a basis carries less authority.

Finally, we have not seen an autumn election since 1974, which represents an awkward precedent for a government to say the least.

So a November election represents a huge gamble. Would Brown really risk being remembered as the shortest serving prime minister since the Georgian era? It looked inadvisable in July and it looks no less so today.

Brown Backfires - Badly

2007-10-02T21:35:00.000Z

This afternoon's announcement by the prime minister that 1,000 British troops were to be home from Iraq by Christmas must have seemed like a good idea at the time. What better way to grab the headlines away from those conferring Tories? (Almost as good as announcing the election date during David Cameron's speech.)

Subsequent coverage, however, has been less than kind, helped by some brilliant performances from Conservative politicians. Sir John Major's intervention, for instance, with his memorable skewering of Brown's indulgence in the "nods, the winks, the hints, the cynicism" struck a note that was both politically telling, and true.

Furthermore, Newsnight have picked up that the substance of the announcement itself is a typical Brownite display of smoke and mirrors: of the 1,000 troops coming home, 500 were on their way in any case, and 500 hadn't even left the UK! (That Labour knows it has made a huge misjudgement now is confirmed by their only being able to find the grey, anonymous figure of Bob Ainsworth to carry the can.)

What a backfire! Depending on tomorrow's coverage, this could see Brown bounce right into Cameron's lap. And by a lucky coincidence, Mr Cameron has the perfect platform to help it happen. One or two well-crafted jokes in his keynote speech tomorrow and his woes will be forgotten.

Better for Brown if he had announced an early election tomorrow after all: his cheap trick today has made a Labour victory in such a contest look much more difficult.

A Question Of Trust

2007-10-02T15:49:00.000Z

Fraud, at the BBC, is endemic.

That is the message of the latest rigged pay-per-call competition phone-in at the Corporation, this time run by Radio 1. Under the self-serving headline, "BBC Unearths New Competition Fake", the Beeb reports:

A number of BBC staff members have been disciplined after a worker posed as a phone-in competition caller on Jo Whiley's Radio 1 show in April 2006 ... The BBC said the DJ, who hosts the late morning show, was unaware that the caller was not a member of the public.

The BBC's governing body, the BBC Trust, said it was "satisfied" managers were taking appropriate action.

How ironic that the Corporation's new governing body should be called the "Trust": it is precisely that quality which has been permitted to leach away over the years. This latest scandal goes further to show just how bereft of trust the BBC now is.

Radio 1's is the latest in a long line of similar frauds which have recently come to light. Together, they make a mockery of the BBC's core remit to "serve the public interest".

It has been apparent for some time that the Corporation's news reporting is hopelessly biased. Combined with the oppressive and inefficient means whereby it is funded, and the mounting pressure of these lesser scandals, the case for privatisation grows stronger by the day.

In respectful echo of our prime minister's passion for the Bible, I would draw the attention of the "BBC Trust" to the following text (Luke 16:10):

Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.

The BBC cannot be trusted in either the great or the little things any more; its time is past. Enough is enough.

Dispatches And The Migration Debate

2007-10-01T20:03:00.000Z

Following on from my last post, I have just finished watching the Channel 4 Dispatches programme which drew heavily on the IPPR’s report. It was a laudable effort, comprising carefully dispassionate reportage which used interviews to elucidate the IPPR data with anecdote.

The broadcast addressed sensitive issues: a couple who were passed over for a council house in favour of asylum seekers were interviewed – as was a disabled Somali refugee who had been granted accommodation. It also brought to light less prominent areas of difficulty, such as the problems faced by primary schools in teaching classes with a large proportion of non-English-speaking children.

Vaz was right: this programme sometimes made for uncomfortable viewing. If I were Portuguese, for example, it would have made me angry and embarrassed. (The numbers show that immigrants from Portugal are among the least employed and that their children are among the lowest achievers at school.) I wouldn’t be surprised to see a formal protest about this.

I still can’t see any constructive purpose to Channel 4’s programme – indeed, it ended in a series of questions and was careful not to offer any answers – but it has done an invaluable service nevertheless.

Migration is an emotive subject, but is essential that the government empowers itself to manage a sensible policy in this area. (My own preference would be for a series of reforms to deliver a net primary migration target of zero per annum.) Channel 4’s contribution has been to help open the floor: reform without debate is simply not possible.

Not for the first time, Channel 4 has used television to do the country a service. What a pity our official national broadcaster is no longer up to the task.

Muddle Over Migration

2007-10-01T14:03:00.000Z

In news today, the Institute for Public Policy Research has published a report on the extent to which immigrants from various places contribute to the UK economy. As the compilers of the survey warn, "it is not an attempt to cast immigrant communities in a bad or good light." Containing data on the various groups' rates of employment, however, together with the proportion of each group claiming various benefits and living in social housing, it was inevitable that the report would be used to make such comparisons.

The Standard's coverage, for example, used the piece to compile a table of the "ten lowest ranked immigrant groups for employment". (These comprise migrants from Somalia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Cyprus, Jamaica, China, Portugal and India. The paper's "five highest ranked groups" comprise migrants from Australia, France, Canada, Poland and Zimbabwe.)

Not surprisingly, the report - which was put together for a Channel 4 documentary to be aired tonight - has therefore drawn criticism. Keith Vaz, who chairs the home affairs select committee, was quoted in the Telegraph saying:

I would be very concerned at any programme which might turn immigrant groups against each other ... Putting different ethnic groups into league tables is not the best way of securing an integrated society.

Quite right. How, then, did he feel about Trevor Phillips ' comments last week about setting up a "two-track immigration system"?

You might say that people who are basically here for work, they and their employers might have to make a contribution ... That would be one track, a kind of semi-citizenship for transitory workers where temporary migrants pay for public services such as health, education and welfare ... Then there needs to be another track for people who want to come and be British.

What motive could Mr Phillips have had for his suggestion that economic migrants should be penalised? Perhaps, in the light of the IPPR report, he might want to clarify his contribution to the debate.

Where Phillips was right, however - and where the government (of whatever stripe) urgently needs to focus its attention - was when he said of immigration in general:

It's not controlled and not managed. There are definitely issues of competence over the numbers coming here.

This has been clear for some time. Although I can't fathom the original purpose of this odd report, or of Phillips' strange comments earlier, by highlighting the terrible muddle of current policy - and thus contributing to its ultimate resolution - they might end up doing some good.

Update:

More, following the broadcast of Channel 4's programme, in my subsequent post.

Brown's Britain

2007-09-25T15:43:00.000Z

Or at least, that apparently was the message of his speech to his party's conference yesterday. Watching the coverage, however, the message I took from the speech was: Brown's a charlatan.

My answer to crime and disorder - our policy - is to both punish and prevent.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, perhaps. And just look where that's left us after ten years! He even had the gall to re-announce an unworkable sentencing idea from February, which was reminiscent of all those duplicate spending pledges he used to make when Chancellor.

Sometimes people say I am too serious and I fight too hard and maybe that's true.

"My weaknesses? Well, people say I push myself too hard and I'm too much of a perfectionist. Do I get the job?"

This is my moral compass.

This is my cold nausea.

And I say to the children of two parent families, one parent families, foster parent families; to the widow bringing up children: I stand for a Britain that supports as first class citizens not just some children and some families but supports all children and all families.

We all remember that biblical saying: "suffer the little children to come unto me." No Bible I have ever read says: "bring just some of the children."

Ooh, nasty! That'll teach those horrible Tories for suggesting they might think about wanting to promote marriage (subject to the appropriate review process, of course, can't be too hasty about these things). Obviously, Mr Brown's misconstruction of his enemy's position is wilful: the idea is recognise the reality that children from single parent homes are at a disadvantage, and attempt, therefore, to incentivise a reduction in the number of those homes.

What makes his Biblical allusion doubly bilious is that he recognises this when he proposes his own solution to the problem of family breakdown:

And because it's unfair to the children that fathers walk away from their responsibilities, we will insist on new powers to name absent fathers on birth certificates and to pay their share: maintenance deducted from benefits as we return them to work.

How characteristically stubborn and cock-eyed! We know that the tax credit system is a complete bust, so - let's expand it! Let's make it more complex at the same time! And you have to love the way the old son-of-a-manse assumes that all absent fathers are unemployed.

MRSA and C-Difficile are this century's hospital diseases which every modern country is now having to root out.

"I know we've been in charge of this system for over a decade, but please - please! - don't blame us if it's a filthy mess."

All these quotations remind me of why I was so angry watching the edited highlights last night. This is a man who has tinkered and taxed his way through ten years of expensively inconsequential misgovernment, and he wants to present himself as a new broom! Above all, it was his party's policy on devolution which is ushering in the real possibility that Scotland may leave the Union. How emetically hypocritical that this smug vandal should want to present himself as the champion of Britain!

If Brown's Britain, then (to coin a phrase) will the last one to leave please turn out the lights?

Scientist Defends Salary

2007-09-24T14:03:00.000Z

At least, that was my interpretation of the news that

Professor James Ironside, of the National CJD Surveillance Unit at Edinburgh University ... said: "Although the number of BSE and vCJD cases is dropping, we ignore these diseases at our peril."

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? If he admitted that there was nothing left for his unit to surveil, even our witless and wasteful government might object to bankrolling his further efforts.

Comparing the predictions of doom over climate change to our earlier panic over BSE recently, I wrote:

Since 1990 there have been 166 cases of vCJD. Deaths from vCJD peaked at 28 in 2000, and fell to 5 in 2006.

So it is with climate change ... A few years hence, as we find ourselves unrinsed from our homes by torrents of boiling seawater after all, we will laugh about the hysteria - and the scientists, media and politicians will have moved on to panic about something else.

In light of the eminent Professor Ironside's contribution today, this prediction clearly requires amending. It would now appear that no matter how defunct a scare may become, there will always be someone around in a white coat - bought with the taxpayer's shilling - to lambast our complacency and continue to panic for their own benefit.

Environmentalists Would Rather Abolish Civilisation Than Save It

2007-09-23T18:34:00.000Z

At some point, as climate change became a bigger and more fashionable issue over the years, I had an idea. Though I brought my formal scientific training to an amicable end at GCSE, I was aware that oceanic plankton were responsible for most of the Earth's photosynthesis. I also read at some point that this made them the ideal "carbon sink": having absorbed carbon dioxide and released oxygen, the "phytoplankton" die, fall to the bottom of the ocean and remain there until BP dig them up again in a handily modified form an aeon or two later.

Why aren't the anthropogenic climate change believers interested in this, I thought? If you wanted to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, why not dump nitrates in the ocean to encourage plankton growth and sit back as Nature, and chemistry, take their course?

And so to an article in today's Times - called 'Fertilising' Oceans With Iron May Combat Climate Change - which confirmed that the scientific community had been alive to the notion well in advance of my untutored musings.

The theory, known as "ocean fertilisation", has long caused controversy among marine scientists, many of whom doubted that it could work. This week leading researchers will meet at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts for a scientific conference to discuss the idea.

Agog to learn more, a Wikipedia piece on iron fertilization contained much of interest:

Consideration of iron's importance to phytoplankton growth and photosynthesis dates back to the 1930s when English biologist Joseph Hart speculated that the ocean's great "desolate zones" (areas apparently rich in nutrients, but lacking in plankton activity or other sea life) might simply be iron deficient. Little further scientific discussion of this issue was recorded until the 1980s, when oceanographer John Martin renewed controversy on the topic with his marine water nutrient analyses ...

Martin hypothesized that increasing phytoplankton photosynthesis could slow or even reverse global warming by sequestering enormous volumes of CO₂ in the sea ... Perhaps the most dramatic support for Martin's hypothesis was seen in the aftermath of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Environmental scientist Andrew Watson analyzed global data from that eruption and calculated that it deposited approximately 40,000 tons of iron dust into the oceans worldwide. This single fertilization event generated an easily observed global decline in atmospheric CO₂ and a parallel pulsed increase in oxygen levels.

Why hasn't this been at the top of the anthropogenic warming agenda? Here we have a possible solution to the problem which would not involve sacrificing the industrialisation of the developing world or the standard of living enjoyed in developed countries. What adherent of the anthropogenic theory could possibly object?

Step forward - of all people - the environmental movement! As reported in the Times:

Dr David Santillo, a senior scientist at the Greenpeace research laboratories at Exeter University, said iron fertilisation was a foolish idea. "There is no proof that the plankton blooms result in carbon being locked into sediments," he said. "Adding iron on such a scale will also damage natural ecosystems."

He is, of course, simply dead wrong on the first count. On the second, the whole point about Hart's "desolate zones" is that there isn't a natural ecosystem there - plankton are the first link in the food chain. And how much more "natural" an event does the good Doctor want than a volcanic eruption? (Even Greenpeace, in all its myopic hatred, couldn't blame McDonald's for that.)

The saddening conclusion must be that the environmentalists simply don't want to find a scientific solution to the problem they say is so serious. They would rather abolish civilisation instead. In short, they have their dogma, and they are sticking to it. How refreshing to find a major conflict between religious doctrine and the scientific method being played out in the 21st century!

Let me declare my loyalty now. I believe in human ingenuity. I applaud our scientific achievements and our technology. I believe in progress.

What better proof than their repudiation of a constructive and scientific solution to the problem which ostensibly exercises them do we need than that the little dictators of the eco-doom movement stand for just the opposite? For regression as well as repression? For primitivism and nature worship above logic?

In other words, the supposedly "ethical" crowd who lament the depredations of "corporations" and "consumers" are in actual fact themselves the biggest threat to human comfort and happiness. To adapt a line from the religion which used to prevail in this country before environmentalism took over: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the billions of motes that are in the ocean?"

Merv The Swerve?

2007-09-21T09:57:00.000Z

As the BBC reports, Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has faced his grilling from MPs after being criticised for his supposed "U-turn" over giving assistance to the Northern Rock.

He faced tough questioning from the House of Commons treasury select committee over the "credit crunch" taking hold of financial markets ... His job could be on the line, with discussions under way on whether to renew his five-year term, which ends next June.

Mr King told the committee that it would have been "irresponsible" for the Bank to intervene in the markets during August, as it would have unnecessarily undermined confidence in the banking system. But he said that when the run on the Northern Rock began, the situation changed, and the "pictures on television" of people queuing for their money meant the Bank had to step in and restore confidence.

The article also quotes from a letter which King sent the select committee last week.

The provision of such liquidity support undermines the efficient pricing of risk...That encourages excessive risk-taking and sows the seeds of a future financial crisis.

Was the Bank's subsequent loan to the Rock an embarrassing U-turn? Did Merv swerve?

Hardly.

In that same letter to the committee, King also wrote that

Central banks, in their traditional lender of last resort (LOLR) role, can lend "against good collateral at a penalty rate" to an individual bank facing temporary liquidity problems, but that is otherwise regarded as solvent. The rationale would be that the failure of such a bank would lead to serious economic damage, including to the customers of the bank. The moral hazard of an increase in risk-taking resulting from the provision of LOLR lending is reduced by making liquidity available only at a penalty rate.

This is exactly what has happened in the case of Northern Rock, and was as essential as the government's deposit guarantee to preventing headlines like "Panic Hits Alliance & Leicester" (the Sun). If it had not been checked, that panic would have spread through the British banking system - after all, many large banks had fallen victim to exactly the same liquidity squeeze as the Rock. If the banking system were to collapse it would take the whole economy with it.

An interesting aside is that without the enactment of EU directives on "market abuse", all of this could have been accomplished quietly, behind the scenes. (King himself said he would have preferred it this way.) As things were, once the Bank had publicly advanced its emergency lending arrangement to Northern Rock, it was inevitable that all the other banks facing funding problems would have leant on the Old Lady to show them the same trade.

And so we find ourselves in the current situation, which might best be described as an uneasy calm. Whether King ends up a scapegoat remains to be seen. But if we are serious about allocating blame for what has happened, we need look no further than the senior management at Northern Rock, and all the other greedy bank managers who were more than happy to join in the fun.

Britain's Hell - If You're The CRE

2007-09-18T18:29:00.000Z

So the Commission for Racial Equality is to go out in a blaze of glory. At least, that is one interpretation of the news that the CRE - which is to be subsumed within something called the "Commission for Equality and Human Rights" in two weeks' time - has started legal action against fifteen government departments:

The CRE has asked its lawyers to start legal action against 15 government departments and agencies, including the Cabinet Office, health, education, agriculture, local government, trade and industry, defence, the Home Office and the Foreign Office ... The widespread failure across Whitehall to comply with their duties under race relations legislation centre on measures to monitor the ethnic background of their staff and carry out formal assessments of the impact of their policies on racial equality. The duties follow legislation passed in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry.

What sort of measures are we talking about?

The CRE's final monitoring report seen by the Guardian cites as one glaring example its own sponsoring agency, the Department of Communities and Local Government, that has not yet collected records on the ethnic background of 58% of its staff.

How predictable. Race relations have been transformed in this country over the last 30 years, but bodies like this never dissolve themselves quietly when the job is done. Rather, they seize on the most trivial matters to perpetuate the myth of their indispensability.

What, according to the Commission, does the failure of government departments to copy Hitler's SS and obsess over their entire staff's ethnic origins signify?

The findings of the two-year monitoring exercise by the CRE are to be published tomorrow alongside a policy paper giving a final verdict which argues that Britain, despite being the fifth largest economy in the world, is still a place of inequality, exclusion and isolation where segregation is increasing and political and religious extremism is on the rise.

Of course it is! A Britain which did not fit that absurd description would not need some Equality Ombudsman to police footling and offensive measures which accomplish nothing.

I for one do not remotely recognise these islands as "a place of inequality, exclusion and isolation". A recent poll of young British Asians confirms the view that, actually, most of us rub along together quite nicely, thank you.

I wonder if we will ever be able to calculate how counterproductive these silly organisations and even sillier apologies for history might be? After all, the governing party which promotes them has already dealt Britain's ethnic minorities a blow by threatening the future of the Union - but that's another story.

Northern Wreck

2007-09-17T21:12:00.001Z

Huw Edwards just admitted the above Freudian slip on the Ten O' Clock News.

Not yet, Huw, not yet, though it is what many are thinking.

The McCanns, The Media And The Missing Girl

2007-09-17T13:40:00.000Z

The story of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has dominated news coverage, on and off, since May. Such has been the media focus that some are now beginning to lament it. Is the press, and the nation, too intrusive? Is our interest macabre? Are we interfering with the pursuit of justice?

Although these are legitimate questions, some have taken the breast-beating too far. Most egregious was India Knight's article in yesterday's Sunday Times, entitled "You Are All Guilty":

Did they do it? They couldn't have. And yet ... if they did do it, do they have superhuman powers, such as invisibility and Oscar-worthy acting skills? ...

What a twist! How compelling! More, more. Give me the inside story. One of these mornings, we’re going to wake up and see just how ghastly a part our own voyeurism has played in all of this. At least, I hope we are.

What nonsense. This all began when a little girl disappeared. Someone made that happen. Whoever that may be is guilty of a terrible crime, and we need to catch and punish them. Our "voyeurism", while it may be distasteful, counts for nothing.

In any event, as Knight acknowledges, public interest in the case has been stoked by the parents themselves. As Kirsty Wark observed of the pair:

They are incredibly well plugged into the media, and have a campaign organiser, a media advisor who is the godparent of one of their children and a former lecturer in new media, and a roster of loyal friends who give their time, energy and expertise.

They all think laterally about how to produce a new angle on the story. In that way they remind me of the producers on Newsnight, and it's been that way from the beginning.

This may be true, and it may exonerate us from charges of voyeurism, but it does not affect the innocence or guilt of the couple concerned.

Those of us who have nothing to do with the McCanns or the disappearance of little Madeleine have straightforward choices. We can ignore the case. We can observe it. We can comment on it. And if we choose, we can speculate about it too.

The truth is that we do not know very much for a fact about this case yet. Until we do, some of us will choose to speculate about what might have happened, whipped up by the media storm. (Knight speculates that the case is one of infanticide, for example. While she may feel that is probable, it is not certain.)

Cooler heads will wait until we know what happened before pointing the finger. The only comment I would make at this stage is that whoever is responsible for Madeleine McCann's disappearance should be brought to justice - and I hope, too, that she is still alive.

Nuts

2007-09-14T16:01:00.000Z

With the business pages dominated by the woes of Northern Rock, you might have missed the news that another of Britain's venerable corporate institutions is under threat. Immune to the chaos in money markets though it may be, Cadbury's today announced a recall of several tons of chocolate.

A printing error, which led to the "may contain traces of nuts" message being left off a label, is to blame ... The confectionery giant is warning nut allergy sufferers not to eat the recalled bars ... A spokesman added that the affected bars were safe for people who do not suffer nut allergies, and that no customer complaints had yet been received.

Well, of course there wouldn't be any complaints. Presumably, any "nut allergy sufferers" likely to have been affected by potential "traces of nuts" contained in the chocolate concerned will either have died or suffered an incapacitating allergic reaction, thus rendering them unable to pick up the phone. And nobody else would have noticed.

How ridiculous that perfectly good food should go to waste for falling foul of a labelling regulation. If I had an evolutionarily baffling handicap whereby I could be out-survived by a peanut, I should think I'd take every care to consume only nut-free foods. (I might be weaker than a peanut but I could still outwit one.) If Cadbury's, or indeed anybody, were to offer me a bar of chocolate which I did not know to be free of the fatal foodstuff then I wouldn't eat it.

Rather than have people take responsibility for themselves, however, it appears that the food industry must cater for every minority ailment. Who would have thought that "nut allergy sufferers" had the power to take the chocolate out of our mouths? Why is it that we are so indulgent of the tyranny of the minority?

Perhaps we should all capitulate and find our own minority group to belong to. As a male I am in a minority among the UK population. This does not qualify me for preferential consideration at present, but with enough lobbying and special pleading, perhaps one day it might.

Belgian Eructations

2007-09-13T16:27:00.000Z

The Times ran a story about the potential break-up of Belgium over the weekend:

Three months after national elections, a collapse of trust between politicians in the Dutch-speaking north and the French-speaking south has left them unable to form a coalition government, and no solution is in sight.

Belgians have been shocked by a poll this week that gave 43 per cent support in the Flemish north for secession. Even in the French-speaking southern half of Wallonia, which would have the most to lose economically by partition, one in five people believes that a break-up would be favourable.

The naughty agitators who have brought the problem to a head are Vlaams Belang - formerly known, before being banned (such things still happen on the Continent) as Vlaams Blok - a Flemish separatist party whose English-language web site takes the trouble to explain their position to the wider world. They're essentially what the English separatist movement would look like if Britain had one.

We in the Vlaams Belang think that Wallonia will never agree to granting Flanders a bigger say over its own affairs. Wallonia lives off Flemish subsidies and does not want decisions concerning welfare, social security and economic policies to be taken on the regional level. We advocate the independence of Flanders, exactly because we do not think that within the Belgian context Flanders can ever be master of its own house.

And who could say fairer than that?

Further trouble kicked off two days ago when a demonstration against the perceived Islamisation of Europe was forcefully suppressed by the Belgian police. Controversial for some time, the Francophone neo-communist mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, banned this peaceful protest last month (again, such things still happen on the Continent. A Slovak MP has made the obvious point that it all smacks rather of communist-era repression.)

It might appear that nobody on this island would notice or care what happened to Belgium. An anomalous innovation whose defence led us into unconscionably hot water in 1914, what could it possibly signify to us today?

At best, a Czech / Slovak-type breakup might be achievable, though there are many potential permutations of the European map should the Flemish majority choose to secede. Brussels could become a sort of Euro-Jerusalem - hopefully without the bloodshed - shared between both new countries. Or the Francophone Walloons could be subsumed into France. (Would the French tolerate a Francophone province which had its own word for "ninety"?)

This would leave the EU with a huge headache. What voting rights should any new Brussels DC / Wallonia / Flanders / Greater France enjoy? What representation on the EU Commission etc.? There are equally obvious consequences for Belgian law, industry, diplomacy and government.

At worst, there might be civil war. Sophisticated and complacent modernists that we are, this scenario can be all too easily laughed out of court. But Belgium has surprised us before, and last time it turned out to be anything but funny.

Who would have thought that Belgium could be so exciting?

Abortion Law: The End Of The Permissive Consensus?

2007-09-11T13:39:00.000Z

On the 3rd of May, Madeleine McCann was abducted. Since that date - assuming that the 2006 experience is repeated - over 34,000 girls carried by women resident in Britain will have been aborted.

In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that public opinion, according to a new poll, has now moved firmly in favour of tightening our abortion law.

According to the poll, 68 per cent would like to see the upper time limit cut back to 13 weeks, the European average. Support for a cut in the time limit breaks down as 72 per cent of women and 65 per cent of men.

An instance of male selfishness? Or a wish to fit in with a perceived PC consensus?

The poll found that more than half - 55 per cent - say there are too many abortions and numbers should be reduced. Women, young people aged under 24, and pensioners are most likely to back abortion reductions ...

Unsurprising, perhaps, that the generation to whom the permissive society was enthusiastically promulgated should remain loyal to one of its key totems.

Eight out of ten said abortion law should be regularly reviewed to keep up with changes in our understanding of how babies develop.

This reflects the history of UK abortion law. (Our initial upper term limit of 28 weeks - based on an archaic assessment of foetal viability - was reduced to 24 weeks in 1990.) Importantly, it will also reflect the development of ultrasound technology: images of second trimester foetuses have an undeniable baby-like appearance.

A reduction of the upper term limit to 13 weeks would impact under 11% of terminations - the right to choose would not be endangered. It is clear as of this morning that such a move would also reflect public opinion. The proposal may attract some dogmatic opposition, but would surely represent a positive step for British society.

Roy Jenkins famously declared that the civilised society was the permissive society. What would he make of this poll? Perhaps we are on the brink of deciding that sometimes it is more civilised to be less permissive after all.

Jobs For The Brothers

2007-09-10T15:28:00.000Z

Gordon Brown addressed the TUC today amid rumblings of discontent over the sub-inflationary public sector pay settlement he imposed while chancellor. The brothers - and sisters - gave him a reasonable enough ride, preferring to complain in private. Perhaps his headline-grabbing pledge to create half a million "British jobs for British workers" helped. From the Guardian's comprehensive coverage:

The prime minister outlined plans to increase the number of local employment partnerships between major employers and local Jobcentre Plus offices, in which employers give commitments to take on, train and offer jobs to British men and women who are either inactive or unemployed ... Jobcentre Plus offices will be geared up to ensure they can offer a specific job interview for every lone parent, long-term unemployment claimant and most incapacity benefit claimants stating that they wish to work.

Something of a rub there, perhaps. What if they don't "wish to work"?

Other measures unveiled encourage employers to offer jobs to these three groups: a £400 training allowance to train up new recruits from this fast-track programme; extending the guarantee of lone parents' benefits from the current first 15 days of work up to the first six weeks; and offering those finding work a back-to-work credit of £40 a week, rising to £60 a week in London.

£400? Peanuts. Still, it's nostalgic to see Brown reprising his popular routine of spraying taxpayers' money around in pursuit of no conceivable benefit whatsoever.

As to the promise to extend benefit guarantees for single parents. what does he think that would achieve? If it isn't economically viable for single parents to trade in their benefits for paid employment on a permanent basis, what's the point?

The last initiative is by far the most harrowing, however. The disastrous tax credit behemoth has waddled from one disaster to the next. That it stamps on the faces of some of our more vulnerable citizens as it does so renders it one of the most significant social blights of the last ten years. The only reason it survives is that it is Brown's baby: his mother instinct trumps his reason.

Brown's previous efforts at job creation saw the public sector workforce swell to unprecedented dimensions, taking the tax burden with it and forcing the pay curb which has proved such a political headache for him as prime minister. Insofar as it turns out to be more than a mere publicity stunt, this latest pledge on jobs will also fail, and it will do so expensively and unpleasantly at that.

Another Policy Document

2007-09-09T14:37:00.000Z

This week will apparently see the publication of the final Conservative party policy document. Some proposals from the "quality of life" report, compiled by John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith, have already been leaked. Recommendations include changing the stamp duty regime to reward those who insulate their houses, increasing taxes to encourage forms of travel currently perceived as more "environmentally friendly", and (somewhat bizarrely) compelling electronic goods manufacturers to make their products switch off automatically if they are left on standby for an unspecified period of time.

All this should go down well with those who voted Liberal Democrat last time - or who might be tempted to vote Lib Dem next time round - and who Cameron needs to vote Conservative if he wants to be prime minister. While the electoral arithmetic and polling data on environmental issues are pretty compelling, however, it is to be hoped that these bold new ideas are confined to the newspapers. Much as Zac and John might feel strongly enough about the carbon cult to increase Britain's already heavy burden of tax and regulation, it would be a shame to see their wheezes make it to the Conservatives' actual manifesto.

Unless, of course, this is all about national security and the war on terror. After all, now we know that Bin Laden has become concerned about global warming, might he not spare a Conservative administration which committed to taking the problem seriously?

Breaking With The Past

2007-09-06T15:54:00.000Z

Just to make matters clear, David Cameron underlined his determination to break with his party's past in a statement about voluntary national service for 16-year-olds.

The Guardian's report quoted his saying:

I want all Conservatives [and especially Michael Ancram and his confederates] to think carefully before they open their mouths. When you make changes you'll get blasts from the past who signify absolutely nothing ... I don't think when Tony Blair was trying to change the Labour party he spent the whole time worrying about what Tony Benn was saying.

Admittedly, Blair was more than 20 points ahead in the polls in the 1990s, so could more comfortably afford to be an arrogant swine, but otherwise, quite right. Tony Benn is a lunatic communist who thought that drinking tea from a mug was a sufficient basis for his being able to enslave the productive sector of the economy. You can still hear his Bedlamite ranting when it is affectionately indulged on Question Time and elsewhere. His Labour mob were happy to abandon the country to a clique of Marxist union barons and remain forever the sick man of Europe.

The past of Cameron's own party, on the other hand, was extremely positive for Britain - so much so that its erstwhile enemies have sought to connect with it, however guardedly, themselves.

I am not anti-Cameron. I applauded his proposed education policy and was even more impressed by his party's proposals on law and order (some of which have since been endorsed by the president of the Police Superintendents' Association).

I was even happy to make the following prediction back in January:

The Tories' policies remain either hidden or indistinguishable from Labour's. With Gordon in charge, however, their "Dave = Tony" strategy begins to pay off.

This strategy, irksome to them though it might be, will continue to attract support from the Conservative party if it delivers results. What the Cameroons need to understand, however, is that it does not depend on repudiating the party's history.

If it goes down well with the electorate, Dave, then please hone your impression of Tony Blair with all due vigour, and good luck to you. But you shouldn't find it at all necessary to ape him in this precise particular.

Communism failed. Toryism saved the country. By all means meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same; but do, please, note the difference.

DNA Database: Power To Parliament

2007-09-05T15:59:00.000Z

Lord Justice Sedley, or Sir Stephen Sedley as he is known at weekends, has opined that the entire population of the UK - plus tourists - should be entered onto our national DNA database. His concern is that the current system discriminates against those who have been arrested but are found innocent; their details are apparently kept on the database regardless.

Why didn't he suggest simply that the details of such people are removed from the system? As it is, can he really think it possible - or desirable - to compel the entire population of the country to register samples of our DNA with the government? And what of tourists? Urine samples for ferry passengers and cheek scrapings for travellers by air?

Thankfully, his intervention is as irrelevant as it is unhinged: this is not the United States. Judges have no power to dictate to the people.

Although - as a result of Labour's cackhanded constitutional innovation - we are to be lumbered with a Supreme Court, it will not, in fact, be supreme. Under our constitution, parliament is supreme, and will continue to be so.

In this case, in fact, our parliamentarians have risen to the occasion splendidly. The government's response put the wayward justice gently back in his box:

Tony McNulty, Minister of State for Security, Counter-terrorism, Crime and Policing said he was "broadly sympathetic" with Sir Stephen's comments ... "There is a real logic and real cohesion to the point that says we'll put everybody on it. But I think he does underestimate the practicalities, logistics and civil liberties and ethics issues surrounding it."

Indeed. And the opposition's reply was even better:

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, criticised the current system as being "totally arbitrary".

"The erratic nature of this database means that some criminals have escaped having their DNA recorded whilst a third of those people on the database - over a million people - have never been convicted of a crime," he said. "It is long past time that the Government answered our calls for a Parliamentary debate about this database and to put it on a statutory basis."

Amen to that.

Judges do sometimes overreach their authority, as occurred recently when the nature worshippers of Greenpeace persuaded one to try to derail the government's energy policy. As things stand, our constitution guarantees that we can afford to ignore them when they stray off piste.

If we were to adopt a written constitution, of course, as has been mooted by the prime minister, this would change. Our politicians may not exactly be the pick of the crop, but for goodness' sake: don't let's hand more power to the judges!

Michael Ancram And The Modern Conservatives

2007-09-04T18:32:00.000Z

The Conservative party saw two documents published today.

One, "Restoring Pride In Our Public Services", is the party's turgid and tedious policy report on health, education and housing. Any document which begins by trumpeting the achievements of John Major and goes on to include headings like "Incentivising the delivery of outcome objectives" (p. 46) deserves to be passed over in embarrassed silence.

The second, "Still A Conservative", billed as the alternative manifesto of Michael Ancram, is sparkling and timely. That a simple restatement of traditional Conservative values can seem so refreshing is instructive in itself. To give one example, here is what the author has to say about the NHS:

The NHS as an institution is psychologically our insurance and our comfort blanket. We expect great things of it. As it has become increasingly top heavy it has proved less able to live up to those expectations. As Conservatives we must break up this monolith and give it back to its professionals, the doctors and nurses, who really understand the nature and depth of the priorities facing the service and the patients which rely on it. Non-medical professional management may in most cases be necessary, but it should be in the service of the medical professionals rather than as the professionals’ masters. If private investment can help to improve the NHS, then we should embrace it.

Good, common sense Conservatism, pithier and truer than anything in the fifty barren pages on health in the party's official policy report.

Of course, what really attracted attention was Ancram's assertion that

as Conservatives we must show we have changed, but we must beware doing so by trashing our past or appearing ashamed of our history.

Absolutely - though the extent to which Cameron and the rest disregard the achievements of the 1980s has been greatly exaggerated.

Take the revealing aside offered by George Osborne in yesterday's Telegraph. While expounding on his commitment to keep to Labour's spending plans for the three years following any election, he was quoted as saying that

a 2 per cent rise in public spending was "less than the growth in the first Thatcher government".

Or take the absurd claim made by the Cameroons last year that the Conservative party did not propose tax cuts in its 1979 manifesto.

When do you remember Tony Blair harping on about the Wilson years? How often was the Callaghan era invoked as a yardstick by which to judge Labour's contemporary policy platform?

The bald fact is that everyone, Cameron, Ancram, even embittered relics like Heseltine who might never admit it - everyone knows that Thatcher was the kind of leader who bestrides British politics about once a generation and who led one of the most important and benign governments this country has ever seen. Most people in Britain know that. Many people in other countries know it too.

Far from denying this, "modern" Conservatives - all of whom were Thatcherites in their time - implicitly admit that it is true by defending their more controversial policies by reference to the Thatcher years, however mendaciously.

Rather than the soporific dreariness of "Restoring Pride In Our Public Services", then, what could the party of Margaret Thatcher offer to the nation instead? To quote from the Ancram pamphlet again:

A Conservative Britain should "dream of things that have not been and ask why not" [Orwell]. ... Why not a Britain where people count, free to control their own lives and to enjoy the fruits of their own efforts ... Why not a Britain where the State does only what it must, where quality replaces dogma in the provision of public services, where low taxation is an established objective and where regulation is the exception? Why not a Britain where stewardship of our environment is an instinctive responsibility? Why not a Britain where the family within the community is valued, where the distinction between right and wrong means something, where the legitimate and historic rights of minorities are defended and the Rule of Law is respected? And why not a Britain where defence of our sovereignty is paramount, where pride in our country is encouraged, and where our Union Jack becomes again a symbol of stability and of hope in an increasingly turbulent world?

His party might not agree with everything Ancram has to say, but it gets close to the heart of what Conservatism should be about. Indeed, it is to be hoped that such a vision still informs the Toryism of the party's current leadership.

If so, they should embrace it openly. If not, why vote for them?

Not A Defeat?

2007-09-03T13:41:00.000Z

Gordon Brown and others have denied that the planned handover of Basra Palace to the Iraqi army represents any kind of defeat for British forces. (You can read embellished versions of this message in the Guardian here, the Telegraph here and from the BBC here.)

This may be true - even obvious - from our perspective, but how is it being perceived in the Middle East?

Though the sources above made no mention of the fact whatsoever, the Mahdi army has already claimed victory over our retreating forces. The Times noticed this in a piece called "Basra Celebrates British Withdrawal":

Basra's residents expressed pride and satisfaction today at the news that the British troops had slipped out of the city overnight after more than four years of occupation, and most gave credit to the Mahdi Army militia for having driven them out ... Abu Ahmad, 36, an aide in the Basra office of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who controls the Mahdi army, told The Times: "This victory happened with the help of Allah and all those who gave their lives to achieve this goal, the nightly attacks on the palace with mortars and shells, under Moqtada's leadership."

His sentiments were echoed by Mahdi army volunteer Abu Safaa, quoted by Al Jazeera:

Members of the al-Mahdi Army cheered the withdrawal as a victory for the militia and a defeat for Britain. "They were facing catastrophe and withdrew because of the attacks by the Mahdi Army," Abu Safaa, one of the group's fighters, told Reuters news agency.

The odds must surely be that such rhetoric intensifies after Britain pulls out of Iraq altogether. No matter how loudly our government might protest in London, our defeat at the hands of the Shiite army will pass into folk memory on the ground.

This might well be a price worth paying for extricating ourselves from an intensely unpopular war. But it will make life that bit more difficult for those of our allies who remain embroiled in it, and strengthen the resolve of their enemies. For that reason, non-defeat though it may be, our withdrawal should leave us somewhat shamefaced.

Calling Simon Jenkins' Bluff

2007-09-02T14:44:00.000Z

According to his Wikipedia entry, Sir Simon Jenkins was for a number of years the political editor of the Economist. Given the lazily cobbled together rubbish which he foisted on an unwitting Sunday Times readership today, this seems scarcely credible. Entitled, "Call The Fat Cats’ Bluff And Tax Their Preposterous Pay Fairly," here is some of what the daft knight had to say.

Cash bonuses mostly in financial services are beyond the imaginings of wage slaves.

Those of us who work in financial services are "wage slaves".

Bob Diamond, who works at (but does not even run) the floundering Barclays Bank, took a bonus of £10.4m this year. Sir Fred Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland took £2.7m. Last month’s Guardian/Office for National Statistics survey reported that bonuses overall increased 30% in 2007 to £14 billion, double last year’s rise.

Diamond and Goodwin are two men at the very top of an industry which employs over a million people. Elementary arithmetic suggests, therefore, that the average bonus payment might be somewhat short of £14,000 per employee rather than - say - £10.4m. That's almost certainly less than Jenkins pockets for parading his unedifying prejudices across the Times every week.

The apologists have been in full cry. A simple response is to play the comparisons game ... comparisons, such as between executives and Elton John and David Beckham, ignore the fact that such celebrities operate in a truly open market, do not determine their own incomes and, unlike City firms, receive no public money.

As Jenkins' asinine scribblings confirm, it is - yet again - the antagonists, not the apologists, who are "in full cry", but no matter. Who on earth could possibly believe that "celebrities" operate in a more "open market" than City workers? Only, perhaps, the motley clown who thinks that black is white, or that the government somehow pays for the private sector and not the other way around.

The exponential rise in corporate pay is a hangover from the 1986 Big Bang phase of Thatcherite capitalism. If it had anything to do with free competition, there would have been a rush of talent into this market sector and a consequent fall in pay. That has not happened.

Leaving aside the fact that Big Bang was not a phase, that it affected only the City and not the corporate sector and that capitalism funnily enough predates Margaret Thatcher by several thousand years, Jenkins invokes an oft-repeated piece of folk wisdom here. The finance sector is labour extensive and the supply of jobs does not grow because of an increase in the supply of labour. If a fund management company, for example, interviews for a manager for one of its funds, and finds that there are several able candidates on offer, it will not hire three people - it only requires one.

The fact is that there is competition - a huge amount of competition - for those City jobs which are available. This is reassuring when you consider that the City is hiring people to look after hundreds of billions of pounds worth of our pensions and life savings, for instance. It is vital work - more so even than droning on in the columns of a weekly paper.

There is, alas, much more unreasoning dross to be perpetrated on his readers before Jenkins arrives at his quite staggeringly ludicrous closing paragraph.

Capital and labour will never coexist in a climate of equality, but some respect for equity must underpin the nation’s social contract. Otherwise we shall be back to the bitter divisions of the 1970s, where nobody wants to go.

"Capital and labour?" I work in the City, Sir Simon: which one am I? As it was in the 50s, 60s and 70s, the phrase is nothing more than lazy shorthand for "rich and poor". And obviously, the two cannot exist equally since they are defined by their difference from one another.

"Some respect for equity must underpin the nation's social contract ... " The actors' union will be pleased to hear this. As to the "bitter divisions of the 1970s", you will find that the pay differentials you decry were far narrower in those days. Vomited on by thuggish union capi it might have been, but the country certainly had a thriving "climate of equality". Bitter divisions, indeed! That, Sir Simon, is what those benighted experiments in enforcing your beloved material equality tend to engender, and far worse besides.

Simon Jenkins is apparently a multiple-award-winning journalist, knighted for his services to his profession, and a former editor of the Times. What does it say about the state of the British media that such a figure could be capable of penning such a fatuous, tatty article as this one? How could such a one be so blindly, angrily ignorant of the economics of the country in which he holds so senior a position?

Perhaps Jenkins, well into his 60s, is losing his mind. Or perhaps he is, after all, just a preposterous, clodhopping hack who allows himself to be irked by people who are richer than he is.

Cameron On Crime

2007-08-29T14:51:00.000Z

David Cameron yesterday unveiled his party's proposals for dealing with the growing problem of violent crime in Britain. The accompanying document - "It's Time To Fight Back" - makes for interesting reading.

First up is the abolition of the so-called "stop form" - the piece of paper which has to be filled in whenever the police stop someone and search them. The document also advocates broadening the powers of police to initiate stop and search over fixed areas. Both of these are sensible measures which could see fast reductions in the availability of illegal firearms, though they might prove controversial given accusations in the past of racial bias in stop-and-search activity.

The Conservatives would also take a torch to some of the paperwork which keeps our police tied up at their desks:

The Home Office's Police Performance Assessment Framework requires the police to carry out 23 Baseline Assessments and to record and report on 32 Statutory Performance Indicators ... A Conservative Government will order an immediate review of the police performance management regime in order to significantly and quickly improve the presence and visibility of police officers on our streets. As a significant step towards this goal, a large number of national targets on local forces should be scrapped.

Amen, and hallelujah to boot. Most importantly of all, however, the opposition have finally picked up on the government's key failing in this arena:

Due to Gordon Brown’s refusal to pay for extra prison places, the Government now presides over a seriously over-crowded prison system ... The Government has tried to cope with the shortfall by increasing the number of prisoners per cell, doubling up in single cells and trebling up in double cells ... A Conservative Government will build more prison places.

Again, hallelujah! The shameful failure of the government to do this has resulted in lenient sentencing - and more lawlessness - again, and again, and again.

As with Cameron's earlier proposals on education reform, there are areas of weakness. There is some silly criticism of the music industry, and some muddled twaddle about a "British Bill of Rights". But for the main part this is thoughtful stuff - indeed, some of it is essential if we're going to restore the power of the criminal justice system to enforce the law.

As to the government and the "liberal" left, they must know they've been caught on the back foot - their response has been feeble.

According to the Telegraph's coverage:

Labour dismissed Mr Cameron's proposals. A spokesman said: "This document is a fraud on the British people. It contains nothing new of substance. It is simply a package of reheated proposals, none of which is costed. Some of his proposals are frankly ludicrous."

This is vague, largely mendacious invective: a very poor rebuttal.

The Guardian played the proposals down ("his most eye-catching initiative would put a Tory government in conflict with the music, film and video game industries ..."). The BBC played it down and misrepresented it ("among other issues which he felt would help tackle crime, he mentioned ... changes to prison accommodation, such as increasing the number of prisoners in cells").

There is danger here for the government. The latest ICM poll for the Guardian - which still gave Labour an overall lead - put the Conservatives ten points ahead on law and order. Why on earth has Gordon Brown, who must know what a mess the prisons are in, let things get so out of hand?

Brown's reluctance to do anything about the prison population crisis might be rooted in the rich soil of leftist prejudice. The old left's attitude to crime is summed up nicely by the following joke:

A priest, a rabbi and a social worker are walking down the street one day when they see a badly beaten man lying on the pavement. The priest averts his eyes and passes by on the other side of the road. The rabbi does likewise. Only the social worker crosses the road, kneels beside the man and says, "whoever did this to you really needs help".

Cameron's proposals show he understands that Labour's joke is really on us.

Tale Of Two Cities

2007-08-28T16:02:00.000Z

London and Paris have both been talking foreign policy of late. Even though this has been one of Labour's more conspicuous disaster areas, I was surprised by the contrast.

Our own capital awoke this morning to an interview on terrorism with the Foreign Secretary. He dealt vaguely with the importance of having ideas. Then he said that economic development would be key. Third, he spoke (again vaguely) about the need to negotiate.

His one point of substance called to mind a piece written by the editor of the Spectator as he accompanied Gordon Brown to Camp David earlier this month in which he claimed:

Brown's own thinking has shifted on this matter, and the turning-point was the alleged involvement of doctors in the car-bomb plot. In the past, he has tended to believe that the root cause of global terrorism was economic deprivation: or, to put it another way, that trade and aid would be the core of strategic triumph over our Islamist adversaries. The inferno at Glasgow airport sealed in his mind a shift of analysis: that twisted ideas, rather than poverty, were the true basis of the problem.

Miliband's interview causes me to doubt the extent to which Brown has actually changed his mind. Typical of a British leftist to assume that all problems are explicable by reference to the Marxian substructure.

Compare this narrow dreariness to President Sarkozy's speech to French ambassadors yesterday. He identified three challenges faced by the world at the dawn of the 21st century of which the first was as follows:

How to prevent a confrontation between Islam and the West, as desired by extremist groups such as Al Qaeda, who dream of establishing a caliphate, from Indonesia to Nigeria, rejecting at once all openness, all progress, all variety.

His answer, delivered in detail, was political engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East and elsewhere. (His speech also ranged over other major issues such as Iran's nuclear ambitions, the future of the EU - and Turkish membership thereof - Russia's energy assets and the ascent of China.)

Sarkozy, it seems, "gets it". It also seems that Brown and his protege do not.

For the first time ever I think I would actually prefer to be led by the President of France.

... And A Real Hero Tells Her Story

2007-08-27T13:13:00.000Z

Amid the talk of "community heroes", time to remember what heroism really is.

This story comes from a Princeton student blogging from Iraq (link) via Jimmy K:

What do you say when a soldier tells you, without missing a beat, let alone breaking down sobbing as one might expect, that in addition to losing her two best friends and being in the middle of an ugly divorce, she has also been wounded by an Iranian bomb, found out she was pregnant with twins, found out they were dead, and then learned that, by the way, she also had cancer and had better leave her unit and start treatment right away? ... While I stared at her, trying to figure out how to reply, Alison continued: "I definitely want to stay in the Army, but I think after this they probably won't let me. And[ i]t blows that I have to leave my unit early, though. They still have three months to go. But I've been here for a year -- I guess I've done my duty."

Read the whole thing.